Marya Mannes
The ultimate cynicism is to suspend judgment so that you are not judged.Collection: Judgment
A man at his desk in a room with a closed door is a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available.Collection: Men
Borders are scratched across the hearts of men By strangers with a calm, judicial pen, And when the borders bleed we watch with dread The lines of ink across the map turn red.Collection: War
It is privilege of living to be acutely, agonizingly conscious of the moment that is always present and always passing.Collection: Privilege
You cannot know what you do not feel.Collection: Feelings
The greatest miracle of all, the human being.Collection: Miracle
The faucet leak, and learn to leave them so.Collection: Leaks
Until we know what motivates the hearts and minds of men we can understand nothing outside ourselves, nor will we ever reach fulfillment as that greatest miracle of all, the human being.Collection: Heart
Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow.Collection: Nature
An American who can make money, invoke God, and be no better than his neighbor, has nothing to fear but truth itself.Collection: Making Money
The barbarian weapon is fission: the splitting asunder. It has been perfected for death. Our only weapon is fusion: an imperfect process still, though designed for life.Collection: Weapons
You cannot throw words like heroism and sacrifice and nobility and honor away without abandoning the qualities they express.Collection: Integrity
You mix the affluence of the white and the poverty of the black and you do not get a civilized society. Integration on an equal level is one thing. Mixing on an unequal level is another.Collection: Equality
One is as one is, and the love that can't encompass both is a poor sort of love.Collection: Forgiveness
It is a marvellous thing to be physically a woman if only to know the marvels of a man.Collection: Women
To lead means to direct and to exact, and no man dares do either - he might be unpopular. What authority we are given now is a trinity: the grin, the generality, and God (the Word).Collection: Mean
People minus space equals Poverty ... What is living for? If the answer is a life of dignity, decency and opportunity, then every increase in population means a decrease in all three. The crowd is a threat to every single being.Collection: Mean
Flirtation is merely an expression of considered desire coupled with an admission of its impracticability.Collection: Expression
To be successful in the world of art you must, of course, have talent, although very small talents have gone very far in this age. Just as the microphone gave volume to voices that had none, so does the science of press-agentry magnify limited skills into highly saleable properties.Collection: Art
It is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.Collection: Children
The real demon is success-the anxieties engendered by this quest are relentless, degrading, corroding. What is worse, there is no end to this escalation of desire.Collection: Success
The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.Collection: Art
[The sea] is the healer and the reviver, it cleanses the cavities of self-disgust and melancholy, of sloth and negation with the salt solution of life. It cures the lethargies of flesh and spirit with the slap and shake of elemental force. It cradles and comforts. Give it trust and it holds you secure; fight it and it kills.Collection: Ocean
Good-fellowship, unflagging, is the prime requisite for success in our society, and the man or woman who smiles only for reasons of humor or pleasure is a deviate.Collection: Men
The suppression of civil liberties is too many less a matter for horror than the curtailment of the freedom to profit.Collection: Money
No man is a Christian who cheats his fellows, perverts the truth, or speaks of a "clean bomb" yet he will be the first to make public his faith in God.Collection: Faith
Minds are cluttered from the age of six with the values of others-values which bear little relation to their own private capacities, needs and desires.Collection: Mind
In the race for money some men may come first, but man comes last.Collection: Men
Artists never make wars. They are too busy making life out of the matter of their visions.Collection: War
Know the difference between Giant and Jumbo? Between two-ounce and a big two-ounce? Between a quart and a full quart? What's a tall 24-inch? What does Extra Long mean? Who's kidding who?Collection: Mean
In our long and obsessive passion for youth, we have - more than any other modern society - avoided direct approach to age and to dying by denying them in word, in fact, and - above all - in worth.Collection: Passion
A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.Collection: Eye
on Broadway money rules. Like a host of vultures, the ticket brokers, the speculators, the craft unions, the agents, the backers, the real estate owners move in on the creative body and take their bite. The world of dreams breathes in an iron lung; and without this mechanical pumping it dies.Collection: Dream
Promiscuous ... was a word I had never applied to myself. Possibly no one ever does, for it is a sordid word, reducing many valuable moments to nothing more than doglike copulation.Collection: Doe
All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.Collection: Sex
A musical audience is at best uninspiring, at worst definitely drab. ... Respectability hangs like a pall over the orchestra and the boxes; a sort of sterile sobriety ill-fitted to the passionate geometry of music.Collection: Sobriety
Ribbons a-flutter and orchids a-tremble, Yearly the vigilant Daughters assemble, Affirming in fervid and firm resolutions Their permanent veto on all revolutions.Collection: Daughter
flirtation ... is a graceful salute to sex, a small impermanent spark between one human being and another, between a man and a woman not in need of fire.Collection: Sex
A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.Collection: Office
It is not enough to show people how to live better; there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.Collection: Communication
the car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own makingCollection: Race
In aid, the proper attitude is one omitting gratitudeCollection: Gratitude
Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.Collection: Art
In an age where the lowered eyelid is just a sign of fatigue, the delicate game of love is pining away. Freud and flirtation are poor companions.Collection: Love Is
fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.Collection: Fear
Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one lane, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of man and the stigma of his improvidence.Collection: Beach
Revelation is the marriage of knowing and feeling.Collection: Knowing
The New York voice reflects its diversity, its foreignness, and, inevitably, the sense of superiority New Yorkers feel or come to feel. It says, without saying, We Know.Collection: New York
performance is an act of faith.Collection: Performances