Category: Thought

“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”

Will Rogers, “The World Tomorrow,” The Illiterate Digest, 1924

“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

Virginia Woolf, On Not Knowing Greek

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943, Hazel Barnes, translator

“I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It is one big railroad station — with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries.”

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922

“War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket, 1935

“There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.”

Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket, 1935

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.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).

“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Séquestrés d’Altona: A Play in Five Acts, 1960

Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.

Charles Willeford, personal motto, quoted in Marshall Jon Fisher, “The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2000.

“This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960