Quotes from John Steinbeck

I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.

Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.

A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. .. When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim towards reproduction.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.

This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

Socialism is just another form of religion, and thus delusional.

What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.

I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.

I'm in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it's difficult to analyze love when you're in it.

With knowledge there is no hope,... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.

Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

Smile and thank God, that you are alive today!