The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!
It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: ‘You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don’t believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!
The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.
HIS march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.
It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which ‘presented a message,’ to regard ‘Les Miserables’ as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and ‘The Scarlet Letter’ as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn’t mind.
Why, she said, with a smile which snapped back after using as abruptly as a stretched rubber band, didn’t he take a nice walk?
When Buzz gets in, he won’t be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That’ll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he’ll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.
In matrimonial geography the distance between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance between the first naive faith and the first doubting.
There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! There never will be a time when there won’t be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.
But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus,” insisted John Pollikop... “You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners.
She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.
She was a woman with a working brain and no work.
He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.
Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiled from America for the same crimes.
He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.
I wrote ‘It Can’t Happen Here,’ but I began to think it certainly can.
She watched the hulk of marriage drifting down on her frail speed-boat of aspiration, and steered in desperate circles.
In America the Struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor.
And for all her theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to keep her opinions of people to herself. When she was bored by callers, she would beg “Do you mind if I run up to bed now – such a headache,” with a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and which left their guests chilled and awkward.