MAX EASTMAN

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

A smile is the universal welcome.

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

More goods and fewer people" is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future.

The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.

Artists in Uniform

Food is as important to armies as ammunition—but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.

If there is liberty, if there is democracy, in this country, it will stand or fall with the right of the minority to express to the full force of language its opposition in public to the policies of the government. And it will stand or fall with the courage of the minority so to express itself.

Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.

The suppression of the Socialist press has actually been more rapid and efficient in this republic than it was in the German Empire after the declaration of war. And as for our celebrated Anglo-Saxon tradition of free speech—you can’t even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage!

Those consecrating themselves to communism must not only cast out truth, mercy, justice, and personal honor, but undergo a sickening discipline in lies, cruelty, crime, and self-abasement.

Wisconsin is the fountain source of Progressivism. It is the scene of the chief political success of Socialism.