JOHN MASON BROWN

America is a land where men govern, but women rule.

Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others.

How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington as a city that goes around in circles!

The more one has seen of the good, the more one asks for the better.

No one is worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause.

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.

He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.

So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.

I am ready any time. Do not keep me waiting.

The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.

Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes.

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

I have lived long enough to be battered by the realities of life, and not too long to be downed by them.

The comic book is the marijuana of the nursery, the bane of the bassinet, the horror of the home, the curse of the kids and a threat to the future.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.

She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life.

Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you...It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning.

Friendship should be a private pleasure, not a public boast. I loathe those braggarts who are forever trying to invest themselves with importance by calling important people by their first names in or out of print. Such first-naming for effect makes me cringe.

Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

What happiness is, no person can say for another. But no one, I am convinced, can be happy who lives only for himself. The joy of living comes from immersion in something that we know to be bigger, better, more enduring and worthier than we are.

No man, with a man's heart in him gets far on his way without some bitter, soul-searching disappointment. Happy is he who is brave enough to push on to another stage of the journey.

Most people spend most of their days doing what they do not want to do in order to earn the right, at times, to do what they may desire.

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.

To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.