Quote

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

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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
Ghetto
Come
Foreigners
Country
Polish
World
Immigration
People
Allow
Europe
Ghettos
Built
Scum
Running
Tolerant

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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
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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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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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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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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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I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.
John Dos Passos
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Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
John Dos Passos
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Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.
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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The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.
John Dos Passos
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To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.
John Dos Passos
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In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring if they don't fall out they let them live another year.
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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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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A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.
John Dos Passos
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People do not choose a career the career envelopes them.
John Dos Passos
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We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
John Dos Passos