Cultural Critic Quotes

“The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.”

“Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.”

“The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.”

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

“What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.”

“I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf; it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.”

“The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.”

“To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse”

“Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.”

“The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.”

“It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.”

“The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.”

“On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.”

“The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.”

“One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.”

“A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.”

“I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.”

“The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.”

“The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.”

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.”

“We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.”

“I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom... [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.”

“The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.”