PHILIP WYLIE

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

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion.

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.

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

There are in America from fifteen to twenty million religious fundamentalists who are dedicated to doctrines incompatible with democracy in that they insist on their prerogatives as first principles. An even larger group feebly follows the trail of fire breathed by those fundamentalists. They are the most dangerous minority we have because they categorically eschew the reasoned judgments of the majority. Democracy properly allows them the right to worship as they choose. It should never have conceded them the right to establish schools. Education is not a function of any church—-or even of a city—-or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems—have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts.

But we Americans 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.

When you talk to the public about the environment it goes in one ear and out the other. They are only interested in the now.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

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

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

There is no advance without strife.

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.

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

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.

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)