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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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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
Heart
Basically
Complaint
Always
Ideals
Swift
Men
Probably
Complaints
Think
High
Optimist
Thinking
Society
Fairly
Like
Rather
Optimistic
Doesn
Ideal
Bitterest
Even
Measure
Satirist

More quotes by John Dos Passos

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A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.
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A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right
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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.
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Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
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People don't choose their careers they are engulfed by them.
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We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
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A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.
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What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.
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The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Remember that it's never a crime in the face of humanity and enlightenment to distribute the works of the great humanists among the merchants and moneychangers of this godforsaken country... You better slip me the dough.
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It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.
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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.
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One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.
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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.
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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.
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The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.
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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.
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