Max Eastman Quotes

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

A smile is the universal welcome.

The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

Laughter puts your brain, your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.

Living well is the best revenge.If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.

The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

If one were loyal to one's nation only because it was good and true ... one would not be loyal to any nation but to truth and goodness. The idea of patriotism would have no place either in our dictionaries or our lives.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. And a tail is an awkward thing to laugh with, as you can see by the way they bend themselves half double in extreme hilarity trying to get that rear-end exuberance forward into the main scene of action. What puts man on a higher stage of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke

Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.

There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks with equal fluency the American and English languages.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.