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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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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
Great
Accept
Sectarian
Always
Danger
Measurement
Never
Accepting
Accuracy
Events
Formulas
Opinion
Ideology
High
Opinions
Future
Useful
Past
Standards

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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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Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?
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Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.
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People don't choose their careers they are engulfed by them.
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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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If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
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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.
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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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U.S.A. is the speech of the people
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Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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