Philip Wylie Quotes

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft.

Man's destiny lies half within himself, half without. To advance in either half at the expense of the other is literally insane.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

Absolute dominion of a powerful people by a minority always produces national aggression.

The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so is the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind.

Education is not a function of any church or even of a city or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

There is no advance without strife.

The businessmen have corrupted liberty by trying to propose it as a material quality.

A few suits of clothes, some money in the bank, and a new kind of fear constitute the main differences between the average American today and the hairy men with clubs who accompanied Attila to the city of Rome.

But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

God must hate common people, because he made them so common.

Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken

So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase: 'I knew, I never got it said.

I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)