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The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves
John Dos Passos
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John Dos Passos
Age: 74 †
Born: 1896
Born: January 14
Died: 1970
Died: September 28
Journalist
Novelist
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
War Correspondent
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
John Roderigo Dos Passos
J. R. Dos Passos
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More quotes by John Dos Passos
I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.
John Dos Passos
The people of this country are too tolerant. There's no other country in the world where they'd allow it... After all we built up this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners, the scum of Europe, the offscourings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us.
John Dos Passos
Individuality is freedom lived.
John Dos Passos
It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.
John Dos Passos
In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.
John Dos Passos
I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.
John Dos Passos
Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country? asked Marco. Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well here you are paid well and live badly.
John Dos Passos
A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.
John Dos Passos
If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
John Dos Passos
The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.
John Dos Passos
Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.
John Dos Passos
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
John Dos Passos
If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.
John Dos Passos
It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general withtheir vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium.
John Dos Passos
A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.
John Dos Passos
The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.
John Dos Passos
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
John Dos Passos
A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.
John Dos Passos
This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.
John Dos Passos
A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right
John Dos Passos
