JOHN DOS PASSOS

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

U.S.A. is the speech of the people.

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

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

Sex is a slotmachine.

It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you.

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

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

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

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.

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.

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.

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

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.

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.

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.

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

A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.

U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stock quotations …a public library full of old newspapers and dog-eared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of big-mouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U. S. A is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of the address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.

When we like our new rulers we call them public servants. When we are mad at them we call them bureaucrats; but it is the business of self-government to see that they remain servants of the public instead of becoming its masters.

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

Hardly a man came out of wartime Washington whose ways of thinking were not profoundly influenced by that environment. The liberal tenets had become a dogma that a man questioned at his peril.

All the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas—The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men—the heroics about war—my country right or wrong—oh infinities of them! Oh the tragic farce of the world.

Becoming a Socialist right now would have just the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near-beer.

Has not the world today somehow got itself enslaved by this immense machine, the Industrial system? Millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying even under the best conditions, bound in the traces of mechanical industry, without ever a chance of self-expression, except in the hectic pleasures of suffocating life in cities. They grind their lives away on the wheels, producing, producing, producing....Is this what men have been striving for through the ages? Is this ponderous suicidal machine civilization?