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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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John Dos Passos
Age: 74 †
Born: 1896
Born: January 14
Died: 1970
Died: September 28
Journalist
Novelist
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
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War Correspondent
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
John Roderigo Dos Passos
J. R. Dos Passos
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Abandon
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Sane

More quotes by John Dos Passos

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The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.
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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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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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I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.
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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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U.S.A. is the speech of the people
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Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
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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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I dont think there is anything on earth more wonderful than those wistful incomplete friendships one makes now and then in an hour's talk. You never see the people again, but the lingering sense of their presence in the world is like the glow of an unseen city at night--makes you feel the teemingness of it all.
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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.
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A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right
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Shakespeare wouldn't have been any good if he'd stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.
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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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What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.
John Dos Passos