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This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.

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
Political
Whorehouse
Goddam
War

More quotes by John Dos Passos

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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
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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
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In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.
John Dos Passos
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I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot, without tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum . . . .I'd like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours . . . instillers of stodginess.
John Dos Passos
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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
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It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?
John Dos Passos
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People do not choose a career the career envelopes them.
John Dos Passos
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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
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War is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.
John Dos Passos
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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
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There are too many creative writing courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.
John Dos Passos
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There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.
John Dos Passos
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The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.
John Dos Passos
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Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.
John Dos Passos
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That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.
John Dos Passos
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Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
John Dos Passos
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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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It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.
John Dos Passos
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If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
John Dos Passos
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But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.
John Dos Passos