John Dos Passos Quotes

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

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

Individuality is freedom lived.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.

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.

The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.

Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

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.

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

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

A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.

Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

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

Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.

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.

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.

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?

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

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

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.

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

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.

A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.