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The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

Ben Hecht

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Ben Hecht
Age: 71 †
Born: 1893
Born: February 28
Died: 1964
Died: April 18
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Retarded
Trash
Americans
Becoming
Movies
American
Mind
Cultured
People
Eruption

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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.
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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite you can't have both.
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The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: 'Who shall be in charge of telling the story.'
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In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.
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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
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I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life's hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are.
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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.
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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.
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Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.
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Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.
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A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.
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