Do the day's work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation bet...ter to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a stand-patter, but don't be a stand-patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don't be a demagogue. Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table.... Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had been curiously depressed all day. In the night I wakened. First precise thought: I know why I'm depressed--nothing inspired ...is going on. Second: I demand that life be inspired every moment. Third: the only way to guarantee this is to have inspired conversation every moment. Fourth: most people never get so far as conversation; they haven't the stamina, and there is no time. Fifth: if I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer. Sixth: marvelous idea--salvation. Seventh: decision to do it. Deep sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift... and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have asked a lot of my emotions--one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was on...e little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual: the position of the genitals--inter urinas et faec...es--remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: "Anatomy is destiny."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his gentle repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his god being a jew. People co...uld put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles. Your god was a jew. Because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhereabouts in the county Sligo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since I am upon this Subject, I must observe that our English Poets have succeeded much better in the Stile, than in the Sentiment...s of their Tragedies. Their Language is very often noble and sonorous, but the sense either very trifling or very common. On the contrary, in the ancient Tragedies, and indeed in those of Corneille and Racine, tho' the Expressions are very great, it is the Thought that bears them up and swells them. For my own part, I prefer a noble Sentiment that is depressed with homely Language, infinitely before a vulgar one that is blown up with all the Sound and Energy of Expression. Whether this Defect in our Tragedies may arise from Want of Genius, Knowledge, or Experience in the Writers, or from their Compliance with the vicious Taste of their Readers, who are better Judges of the Language than of the Sentiments, and consequently relish the one more than the other, I cannot determine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »