Quotes from Howard Fast

I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life.

Like most thoughtful people who watch what's going on in Washington, venting is very necessary.

In L.A., you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you're cheating on your wife.

I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror.

Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.

To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.

The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.

A man who will traduce those who stood with him in battle is not worth much.

In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.

That, Imperator, is of concern only to myself and to Titus. And further, do not address me as woman. My ancestors were priests at Jerusalem and kings at Megiddo when Rome was a circle of mud huts inhabited by brutes who had not yet learned to weave cloth or even to smelt copper. And as for this meeting, I think that I at least have had sufficient of it—and if you will permit me, I should like to go.

Perhaps nature rations tears. That would be very sensible. You are born with three million one hundred and seventy-two potential tears, and you can use them up by the time you are eighteen or you can conserve them.

There—you mean to eat? No, no—I hold with my blessed mentor, Hippocrates, that three quarters of the physical evils that beset mankind flow from eating too much, not too little.

As Don Louis led them towards Isabella's chambers, he explained to Alvero that their arrival was particularly fortuitous.

That night, we laid our hands on our father's and swore a covenant to freedom, to fight like wolves and die like men until our land was free again. That was the night we became Macabees.

But a man is not born too soon, Paine had smiled. The world waits for men and dreamers, so how can a man be born too soon?