John Dos Passos - People Quotes

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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
Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows?

John Dos Passos
It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.

John Dos Passos
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
It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general withtheir vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium.

John Dos Passos
I don't 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
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
It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.

John Dos Passos
Would not some lightning flash of vision sear people's consciousness into life again? What was the good of stopping the war if armies continued?

John Dos Passos
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.

John Dos Passos
People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

John Dos Passos
The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years that some political movement might tend to the betterment of the human lot, little remains above ground but the tattered slogans of the past.

John Dos Passos
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
But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.

John Dos Passos
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
That is what we must make people feel... the catch in the throat, the wrench to steady the nerves, the determination to carry on.

John Dos Passos
A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.

John Dos Passos
In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans... From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.

John Dos Passos
With people who are young and aren't scared you can do lots.

John Dos Passos
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
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, a few drops of poetry to stimulate their feelings.

John Dos Passos