He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.
He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Wi...
God, sir, men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!
Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull,
All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there’s more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries! Laennec and Osler, those are the men! It’s all very fine, thi...
Preachers and modernist educators and discontented newspapermen and farm agitators—maybe they’ll worry at first, but they’ll get caught up in the web of propaganda, like we all were in the Great War,...
Why, Windrip’s just something nasty that’s been vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in the stomach—quack economists with every sort of economic ptomaine! No, Buzz isn’t important—it’s the...
Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job. Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.
He called himself an agnostic instead of an atheist only because he detested the street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional atheists.
For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.
Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
Where DO you suppose such Americans come from! In fact, I'm quite sure you could both be mistaken for English, if you merely lived here a few years. So it's a quite impersonal question. But don't you...
He saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths far-off and doubtful.
You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
Why, America’s the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t happen here!
What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, but maybe sometimes it’s only a pipe dream! I’m not so sure—now this will shock you, but I want you to listen to one woman who will tell...
She knew the exaltation of starting out in the fresh morning for places she had never seen, without the bond of having to return at night.
Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina m...
Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by asking directions,
It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.