Margaret Deland Quotes

'Great Expectations' has been described as 'Dickens's harshest indictment of society.' Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.

It is a mistake to condemn a horse for being slim and to condemn a capable person for being poor.

We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not sendmen to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty,... it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.

These people who build houses with 13 bathrooms and so on, there's something wrong with them.

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.

I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.

There's people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable. People are being given paid leave for killing people. That's not right. That's not right by anyone's standards.

Hasn’t anyone ever told you? Life isn’t fair.

We may not say to the poor: "You have a right to fight the rich merely because they are rich and in order to make yourselves less poor." We may say: "You have a right to fight to prevent the conditions of your life becoming inhuman," but we may not say, "You have a right to fight merely because you desire to have more and your opponent to have less."

How many kinds of moral and material poverty we face today as a result of denying God and putting so many idols in his place!

Education! Is it education to teach the young that their chances of happiness depend on being richer than their neighbors? Yet that is what it all tends to. Get on! - be successful!

There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.

These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

I'm only human, and I bleed when I fall down.

And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man.

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

I always feel that crime films are about capitalism.

Money and art are far apart.

for someone such as myself, who is kind of feckless and immature, it's better to have rich friends than to be rich yourself, because then you have wealth without the responsibility. You get to go to their houses, and you get acquainted with a level of furniture that you cannot provide for yourself. Furniture, I think is the most important attribute of rich people.

It seems to me that the earth belongs to God who made it and entrusted it to men as a perpetual home. But it cannot have been part of His plan that some men should be ill with overfeeding and that others should die of starvation. No matter what anyone can say they cannot prevent me from feeling sad and angry when I see a beggar crying at a rich man's door.