Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, especially if the goods are worthless.
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
He had unhappily noticed at the mission that when he had most hotly prayed, it had been a way of escaping a decision, of frivolously passing the lot to God.
He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.
He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.
He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.
He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended.
I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity.
I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.
I love America, but I don't like it.
I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.
I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.
I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
Indians, of course, have no 'theology,' and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
It came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself.
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
Now we got a lawyer, we got civilization, which I understand to mean that a man has a chance to get rich without working.
People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'
Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
She did her work with the thoroughness of mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.
The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trouser-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, 'The trouble with this country is-'.
There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don't wish to do.
There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.
There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid'.
There had to be one man in town independent enough to sass the banker!
Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions.
To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn 'reasonable' and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed are the final quarter keep you alive.
We have the power to bore people long after we are dead.
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
Found 44 occurence(s) in 52,092 quotation(s).
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