Government by average opinion is merely a circuitous method of going to the devil; those who profess to lead but in fact slavishly... follow this average opinion are simply the fastest runners and the loudest squeakers of the herd which is rushing blindly down to its destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sue Forbes: Old man routine getting you down? John Forbes: Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I get to feel like a wheel within a wh...eel within a wheel. Sue Forbes: You and fifty million others. John Forbes: I don't want to be like fifty million others. Sue Forbes: Oh, but you're John Forbes, average American, backbone of the country. John Forbes: I don't want to be an average American, backbone of the country. I want somebody else to be the backbone and hold me up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, ...hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good way to think about television--in fact all the media--is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looki...ng. Then from its perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on the average) 30 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 30 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and sh...aved it down till the average is three and a half.... I never write "metropolis" for seven cents, because I can get the same money for "city." I never write "policeman," because I can get the same price for "cop." ... I never write "valetudinarian" at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some of us who sit upon this platform have many a time been clamored down, and told that we had no right to speak, and that we wer...e out of our place in public meetings; far be it from us, when women assemble, and a man has a thought in his soul, burning for utterance, to retaliate upon him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »