John Dos Passos Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Art, Block, Past

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

  22 Copy quote

• People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

  John Dos Passos

  Careers, People

  1959 In the NewYork Times, 25 Oct.

  51 Copy quote

• Individuality is freedom lived.

  John Dos Passos

  Wisdom, Individuality, Liberty

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Views, Generations, World

  John Dos Passos (1970). “The theme is freedom”

  23 Copy quote

• Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.

  John Dos Passos

  Produce, Marxism, Humans

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Night, Thinking, Cities

  John Dos Passos (1973). “The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos”, Harvard Common Press

  5 Copy quote

• The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.

  John Dos Passos

  Museums, World, Becoming

  John Dos Passos (1970). “The theme is freedom”

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Apathy, Complicated, Intense

  9 Copy quote

• I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

  John Dos Passos

  Dawn

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Strong, Men, Fog

  John Dos Passos (1956). “The Theme is Freedom”

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Peace, Cancer, Lying

  John Dos Passos (1973). “The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos”, Harvard Common Press

  5 Copy quote

• I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

  John Dos Passos

  Paddling, Should

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Order, Relief

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

  7 Copy quote

• Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

  John Dos Passos

  Life, Hands, Used

  John Dos Passos (1921). “Three Soldiers”, p.322

  11 Copy quote

• If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

  John Dos Passos

  Special, Would Be, Contemplation

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Spring, Fall, Years

  John Dos Passos (1934). “Three Plays: The Garbage Man, Airways, Inc., Fortune Heights”

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Change, Break Up, Being Alone

  John Dos Passos (2010). “The Ground We Stand on: The History of a Political Creed”, p.443, Transaction Publishers

  9 Copy quote

• Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.

  John Dos Passos

  Art, Coffee, Tired

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Wings, People

  John Dos Passos (1922). “One Man's Initiation--1917”

  5 Copy quote

• We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.

  John Dos Passos

  John Dos Passos (1934). “Three Plays: The Garbage Man, Airways, Inc., Fortune Heights”

  5 Copy quote

• There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Character, Novelists

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Effort, Political, Competition

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• Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.

  John Dos Passos

  Freedom, Democracy, Able

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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

  Running, Country, Ghetto

  John Dos Passos (2003). “Manhattan Transfer: A Novel”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.

  John Dos Passos

  New York, World, Terrible

  John Dos Passos (2003). “Manhattan Transfer: A Novel”, p.187, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

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