John Dos Passos Quotes

“We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.”

— John Dos Passos

“The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armour of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. -John Dos Passos”

— John Dos Passos

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

— John Dos Passos

“What's the use of a lague of nations if it's to be dominated by Great Britain and her colonies?" said Mr. Rasmussen sourly. "But don't you think any kind of a league's better than nothing?" said Eveline. "It's not the name you give things, it's who's getting theirs underneath that counts," said Robbins.
"That's a very cynical remark," said the California woman. "This isn't any time to be cynical."
"This is a time," said Robbins, "when if we weren't cynical we'd shoot ourselves.”

— John Dos Passos

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

“One phrase stuck in Fainy's mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.”

— John Dos Passos

“In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.”

— John Dos Passos

“Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There's more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.”

— John Dos Passos

“All right we are two nations”

— John Dos Passos

“But you just watch, little girl. I'm goin' to show 'em. In five years they'll come crawlin' to me on their bellies. I don't know what it is, but I got a kind of feel for the big money.”

— John Dos Passos

“If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the State.”

— John Dos Passos

Between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground.

— John Dos Passos

“Too goddam many lawyers mixed up in this. Run the sonsobitches out. If they resists shoot 'em, that's what I says to the Governor, but they're all these sonsobitches a lawyers fussin' everythin' up all the time with warrants and habeas corpus and longwinded rigmarole. My ass to habeas corpus.”

— John Dos Passos

So many Americans felt that their neighbor had no right to know more than they did.

— John Dos Passos

“When they were all up playing in the nursery George caught something again and had monia on account of getting cold on his chest and Yourfather was very solemn and said not to grieve if God called little brother away. But God brought little George back to them only he was delicate after that and had to wear glasses, and when Dearmother let Eveline help bathe him because Miss Mathilda was having the measles too Eveline noticed he had something funny there where she didn't have anything. She asked Dearmother if it was a mump, but Dearmother scolded her and said she was a vulgar little girl to have looked. Hush, child, don't ask questions. Evaline got red all over and cried and Adelaide and Margaret wouldn't speak to her for days on account of her being a vulgar little girl.”

— John Dos Passos

“In this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected.”

— John Dos Passos

“Everything published goes down the same chute out of the overbright glare of publicity into oblivion.”

— John Dos Passos

“Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.”

— John Dos Passos

“I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment. The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The only time he attains even fleeting popularity is when his works can be used by some political faction as a stick to beat out the brains of their opponents. Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.
(John Dos Passos, 1957, from the speech he delivered upon accepting the Gold Medal for Eminence in Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters)”

— John Dos Passos

“The old Romans knew better; to keep people quiet they filled their bellies.”

— John Dos Passos

“A nation in which the centralized power and the separate communities work only to nullify each other.”

— John Dos Passos

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

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

“Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.”

— John Dos Passos

“What is the use being a big man if you are wrong?”

— John Dos Passos

“Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.”

— John Dos Passos

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

— John Dos Passos

“Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.”

— John Dos Passos

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

— John Dos Passos

Individuality is freedom lived.

— John Dos Passos

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

— John Dos Passos

“Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?”

— John Dos Passos

“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.”

— John Dos Passos

Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

— John Dos Passos

“To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.”

— John Dos Passos

“I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.”

— John Dos Passos

“Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.”

— John Dos Passos

“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

“This ain't a war ... It's a goddam whorehouse.”

— John Dos Passos

“The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.”

— John Dos Passos

“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

“There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.”

— John Dos Passos

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

— John Dos Passos

Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.

— 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

“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

“I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot, without tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum ... I'd like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours ... instillers of stodginess.”

— 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. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”

— John Dos Passos

“A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.”

— John Dos Passos

“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