Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.
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One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.
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No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.
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The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts --the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria --are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.
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Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.
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It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
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Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.
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The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.
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We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
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Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser Iscariots than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to...
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There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.
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Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.
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Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
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What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore.
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No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
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Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
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We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.
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What men desire is a virgin who is a whore.
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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.
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A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Orego...
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man...
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