Cultural Critic Quotes

“The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads.”

“Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.”

“I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.”

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.”

“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y”

“The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!”

“People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?”

“The only time you have a free press is when you own one.”

“The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.”

“All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.”

“Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.”

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.”

“The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.”

“If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.”

“It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.”

“It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. . . . The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.”

“Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.”

“Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.”

“An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.”

“This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties-for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler-men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated.”

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”

“Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.”

“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.”

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”