Quotes

The Klan is actually as thoroughly American as Rotary or the Moose. Its childish mummery is American, its highfalutin bombast is American, and its fundamental philosophy is American. The very essence of Americanism is the doctrine that the other fellow, if he happens to be in a minority, has absolutely no rights—that enough is done for him when he is allowed to live at all.

The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.

The old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out, even in the Bible Belt.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes. . . . They are the supreme realists of the race.

No sane man, employing an American plumber to repair a leaky drain, would expect him to do it at the first trial, and in precisely the same way no sane man, observing an American Secretary of State in negotiation with Englishmen and Japs, would expect him to come off better than second best. Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

How long will the human race sweat under the superstition that, in order to be happy and useful and intelligent, it is necessary to believe in things? What nonsense indeed! Human progress consists, not in acquiring beliefs, but in getting rid of them.

LOVER. An apprentice second husband; victim no. 2 in the larval stage.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

ADULTERY. Democracy applied to love.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

The public . . . demands certainties. . . . But there are no certainties.

Courtroom: a place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the odds in favor of Judas.

Suicide: a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

A god from the machine.

But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.

Games in which all may win remain as yet in this world uninvented.

God bless Captain Vere!

I would prefer not to.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Towards thee I roll thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . strike, strike through the mask!

And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in this world.

Because of their age-long training in human relations—for that is what feminine intuition really is—women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise, and I feel it is up to them to contribute the kinds of awareness that relatively few men . . . have incorporated through their education.

Between the layman’s “ Naturally no human society” and the anthropologist’s “No known human society” lie thousands of detailed and painstaking studies, made by hurricane-lamp and firelight, by explorer and missionary and modern scientists, in many parts of the world.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

Warfare . . . is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.

Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground for claiming that the mother of young children is more peaceful, more responsible, and more thoughtful for the welfare of the human race than is her husband or brother.

As the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. . . . If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

What though before us lies the open grave?