Quotes

Nous avons changé tout cela .

Wilson Mizner . . . recalls his embarrassment when he first came into the world, and found a woman in bed with him.

Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a whore.

I never saw a mob rush across town to do a good deed.

You sparkle with larceny.

You’re a mouse studying to be a rat.

[ On his deathbed, telling a priest he had no need to speak with him :] I’ve been talking to your boss, Father.

Hello, sucker!

Human beings . . . they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?

Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down.

As he saw it, there was only one choice—to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.

Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party and in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories.

The market economy as such does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world.

Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.

His servants he, with new acquist

Best image of myself and dearer half.

Belial, in act more graceful and humane;

From morn

The imperial ensign, which full high advanced

What I have spoken, is the language of that

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.

Where glowing embers through the room

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key, perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.

Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. . . . But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!

For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.

A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

I forgot in Camelot

Unearned increment of value.

The heart can push the sea and land

Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea.

So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything that is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.

No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust.

[ On the completion of the Sistine chapel ceiling :] I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

It might be a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way . . . to the associated zoölogical phenomenon of molting. . . . A resort to the scientific name for molting, which is ecdysis, produces both ecdysist and ecdysiast.

Love is the most fun you can have without laughing.

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

Life may not exactly be pleasant, but at least it is not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband’s clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.