Category: Thought

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

Virginia Woolf, The Leaning Tower (May 1940)

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

H. L. Mencken, Women as Outlaws, The Smart Set (December 1921)

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)

“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).