Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.
John Steinbeck
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Steinbeck
Age: 66 †
Born: 1902
Born: February 27
Died: 1968
Died: December 20
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Salinas
California
John Ernst Steinbeck
Jr.
John Ernst Steinbeck
John Ernest Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
Steinbeck
Men
Started
Herds
Winning
Battles
Start
Followers
Fighting
Wars
Free
Defeat
War
Battle
Cannot
Fight
Always
Leader
Herd
More quotes by John Steinbeck
Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.
John Steinbeck
But you must give him some sign, some sign that you love him... or he'll never be a man. All his life he'll feel guilty and alone unless you release him.
John Steinbeck
Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
John Steinbeck
If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.
John Steinbeck
Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.
John Steinbeck
And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
John Steinbeck
Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
John Steinbeck
Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.
John Steinbeck
Lennie said quietly, It ain't no lie. We're gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an' live on the fatta the lan'.
John Steinbeck
(Suicide) takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.
John Steinbeck
Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.
John Steinbeck
for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.
John Steinbeck
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
John Steinbeck
The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.
John Steinbeck
There is comfort in routine.
John Steinbeck
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.... The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
John Steinbeck
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
John Steinbeck
He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.
John Steinbeck
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
John Steinbeck
Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.
John Steinbeck
