Marya Mannes Quotes - Page 3

Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow.

Until we know what motivates the hearts and minds of men we can understand nothing outside ourselves, nor will we ever reach fulfillment as that greatest miracle of all, the human being.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

An American who can make money, invoke God, and be no better than his neighbor, has nothing to fear but truth itself.

The barbarian weapon is fission: the splitting asunder. It has been perfected for death. Our only weapon is fusion: an imperfect process still, though designed for life.

You cannot throw words like heroism and sacrifice and nobility and honor away without abandoning the qualities they express.

You mix the affluence of the white and the poverty of the black and you do not get a civilized society. Integration on an equal level is one thing. Mixing on an unequal level is another.

One is as one is, and the love that can't encompass both is a poor sort of love.

It is a marvellous thing to be physically a woman if only to know the marvels of a man.

People minus space equals Poverty ... What is living for? If the answer is a life of dignity, decency and opportunity, then every increase in population means a decrease in all three. The crowd is a threat to every single being.

To lead means to direct and to exact, and no man dares do either - he might be unpopular. What authority we are given now is a trinity: the grin, the generality, and God (the Word).

The suppression of civil liberties is too many less a matter for horror than the curtailment of the freedom to profit.

[The sea] is the healer and the reviver, it cleanses the cavities of self-disgust and melancholy, of sloth and negation with the salt solution of life. It cures the lethargies of flesh and spirit with the slap and shake of elemental force. It cradles and comforts. Give it trust and it holds you secure; fight it and it kills.

It is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.

The real demon is success-the anxieties engendered by this quest are relentless, degrading, corroding. What is worse, there is no end to this escalation of desire.

Promiscuous ... was a word I had never applied to myself. Possibly no one ever does, for it is a sordid word, reducing many valuable moments to nothing more than doglike copulation.

The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.

on Broadway money rules. Like a host of vultures, the ticket brokers, the speculators, the craft unions, the agents, the backers, the real estate owners move in on the creative body and take their bite. The world of dreams breathes in an iron lung; and without this mechanical pumping it dies.

All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.

A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.

Good-fellowship, unflagging, is the prime requisite for success in our society, and the man or woman who smiles only for reasons of humor or pleasure is a deviate.

No man is a Christian who cheats his fellows, perverts the truth, or speaks of a "clean bomb" yet he will be the first to make public his faith in God.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

Minds are cluttered from the age of six with the values of others-values which bear little relation to their own private capacities, needs and desires.

Flirtation is merely an expression of considered desire coupled with an admission of its impracticability.