Quotes from John Dos Passos

Individuality is freedom lived.

U.S.A. is the speech of the people.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.

We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.

We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.

A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right

Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.

But the workingpeople, the common people, they won't allow it.' 'It's the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of great men.... If it's not going too far back I'd like to know who it was demanded the execution of our friend Jesus H. Christ.

What's the use of a lague of nations if it's to be dominated by Great Britain and her colonies? said Mr. Rasmussen sourly. But don't you think any kind of a league's better than nothing? said Eveline. It's not the name you give things, it's who's getting theirs underneath that counts, said Robbins. That's a very cynical remark, said the California woman. This isn't any time to be cynical. This is a time, said Robbins, when if we weren't cynical we'd shoot ourselves.

Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller. . . . There's jobs all right. . . . I'll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I've worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.

Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher's apron who had a baseball cap on backwards.

The pressure exerted by a gas on the walls of its container does not depend upon the individual histories of the molecules composing it," says the French existentialist philosopher.

but on account of the flag and prosperity and making the world safe for democracy, they were afraid to be with him, or to think much about him for fear they might believe him; for he said: While there is a lower class I am of it, while there is a criminal class I am of it, while there is a soul in prison I am not free.

and the Sunday the bishop came you couldn't see Halley's Comet any more and you saw the others being confirmed and it lasted for hours because there were a lot of little girls being confirmed too and all you could hear was mumble mumble this thy child mumble mumble this thy child and you wondered if you'd be alive next time Halley's Comet came round

Never mind dear. . . . It would have been too rich anyway. . . . You eat that and I'll let you run out after dinner and buy some candy." "Oh goody." "But dont eat the icecream too fast or you'll have collywobbles.

Emile, you're a goodlooking fellow and steady and you'll get on in the world. . . . But I'll never put myself in a man's power again. . . . I've suffered too much. . . . Not if you came to me with five thousand dollars.

But you just watch, little girl. I'm goin' to show 'em. In five years they'll come crawlin' to me on their bellies. I don't know what it is, but I got a kind of feel for the big money.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world. All we can do is go round and round in a squirrel cage.

There's a rattle of chains and a clatter from the donkeyengine where a tall man in blue overalls stands at a lever in the middle of a cloud of steam that wraps round your face like a wet towel.