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John Dos Passos Quotes

John Dos Passos

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It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Freedom
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Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Money
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If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Romantic
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We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Strength
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The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.
- John Dos Passos
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The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
- John Dos Passos
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What is the use being a big man if you are wrong?
- John Dos Passos
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A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.
- John Dos Passos
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If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
- John Dos Passos
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People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.
- John Dos Passos
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Sex is a slotmachine.
- John Dos Passos
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A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
- John Dos Passos
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The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.
- John Dos Passos
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Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.
- John Dos Passos
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Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.
- John Dos Passos
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U.S.A. is the speech of the people.
- John Dos Passos
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Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.
- John Dos Passos
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Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
- John Dos Passos
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Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Art
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Individuality is freedom lived.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Wisdom
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Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Produce
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I dont think there is anything on earth more wonderful than those wistful incomplete friendships one makes now and then in an hour's talk. You never see the people again, but the lingering sense of their presence in the world is like the glow of an unseen city at night--makes you feel the teemingness of it all.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Night
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War is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Peace
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The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Museums
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I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Dawn
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Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Apathy
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The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Strong
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I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Paddling
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Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Lying
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If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Special
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Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Life
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In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don't fall out they let them live another year.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Spring
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The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Book
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The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Effort
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A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Knowledge
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Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Freedom
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The people of this country are too tolerant. There's no other country in the world where they'd allow it... After all we built up this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners, the scum of Europe, the offscourings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Running
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A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Journey
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One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Memories
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The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Character
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Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Time
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Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Imagination
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That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Past
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A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Ice Cream
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Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Country
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It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Attitude
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Curiosity urges you on-driving force.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Curiosity
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Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Writing
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I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Optimistic

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