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If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much - make it greedy, miserable and sick.
John Steinbeck
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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
Much
Miserable
Make
Destroy
Sick
Nation
Nations
Simple
Give
Giving
Greedy
More quotes by John Steinbeck
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.
John Steinbeck
My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.
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
The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.
John Steinbeck
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.
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
There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.
John Steinbeck
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
John Steinbeck
But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.
John Steinbeck
It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.
John Steinbeck
A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.
John Steinbeck
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
John Steinbeck
Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.
John Steinbeck
I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.
John Steinbeck
A man without words is a man without thought.
John Steinbeck
A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.
John Steinbeck
I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.
John Steinbeck
The power of an attitude is amazing
John Steinbeck
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.
John Steinbeck
There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp.
John Steinbeck
