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When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.

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
Boss
Sums
Source
Significance
Frighten
Results
Merits
Doubt
Merit
Heresy
Economic
Criticism
Soar
Small
Blessing
Wages
Entitle
Money
Result
Activities
Soars
People
Activity
Receiving
Sacrilege
Magic

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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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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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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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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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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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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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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Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop.
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Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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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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The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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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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For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
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That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
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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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