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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

James Thurber

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James Thurber
Age: 66 †
Born: 1894
Born: December 18
Died: 1961
Died: November 2
Autobiographer
Cartoonist
Drawer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Columbus
Ohio
James Grover Thurber
Fool
Democracy
Wisdom
Many
Much
Time
People
Stupidity

More quotes by James Thurber

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If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
James Thurber
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Love is what you've been through with somebody.
James Thurber
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History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.
James Thurber
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Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog
James Thurber
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber
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I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.
James Thurber
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The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell
James Thurber
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It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber
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I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?
James Thurber
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I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
James Thurber
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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber
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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber
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Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
James Thurber
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We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
James Thurber
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Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.
James Thurber
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I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good, the Golux said, by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life. The firefly's ? said the minstrel. The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.
James Thurber
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It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.
James Thurber
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I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
James Thurber
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He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
James Thurber
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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
James Thurber