Quotes from Philip Wylie

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

God must hate common people, because he made them so common.

The businessmen have corrupted liberty by trying to propose it as a material quality.

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

A thought that had been in the archives of his mind for many months came sharply into relief: of all human beings alive, the scientists were the only ones who retained imagination, ideals, and a sincere interest in the larger world. It was to them he should give his allegiance, not to the statesmen, not to industry or commerce or war.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former.

Faith's the agreement to abandon detachment, John! To supplant a packaged security for open integrity. To agree not to learn anymore. It is the acceptance of a channel, by a man who was previously able to move on the whole terrain

But you don't know how to read anymore! When you open a book, you do it in the faith and assurances that you are already master of what it contains and that the author has written only so you may prove him wrong!

It dawned upon everybody that Aggie, at perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds and five feet nine and a half, was, as Beth later said, 'dynamite in the physical culture department.

Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken

They are afraid. They would, today, keep secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it into limbo—their kind. To limbo.

it is only the unthinking mind that finds anything unthinkable. To use the word is just to show your membership card in the society of morons.

We made up our own religions and pretended they came from outside us.

Imagination without logic is worthless. It conceives uncritically; pursued for its own sake, it but deforms the mind. Logic by itself is only futile; without imagination it can only reprove the proven and so discover nothing.

The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so is the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

God must hate common people, because he made them so common.

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.