Top 80 John Dos Passos Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Individuality is freedom lived.”

— John Dos Passos

2. “War is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.”

— John Dos Passos

3. “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.”

— John Dos Passos

4. “Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.”

— John Dos Passos

5. “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.”

— John Dos Passos

6. “We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.”

— John Dos Passos

7. “In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don’t fall out they let them live another year.”

— John Dos Passos

8. “Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.”

— John Dos Passos

9. “People don’t choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.”

— John Dos Passos

10. “The world’s becoming a museum of socialist failures.”

— John Dos Passos

11. “I’ve always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.”

— John Dos Passos

12. “Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.”

— John Dos Passos

13. “Curiosity urges you on-driving force.”

— John Dos Passos

14. “Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.”

— John Dos Passos

15. “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.”

— John Dos Passos

16. “I never see the dawn that I don’t say to myself perhaps.”

— John Dos Passos

17. “The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world.”

— John Dos Passos

18. “To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.”

— John Dos Passos

19. “The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation. That’s history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.”

— John Dos Passos

20. “Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.”

— John Dos Passos

21. “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.”

— John Dos Passos

22. “The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.”

— John Dos Passos

23. “Women alone always order sole. It means something.”

— John Dos Passos

24. “Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain’t pinned down they’re hell.”

— John Dos Passos

25. “The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, workingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the rich, the cops were for the rich;.”

— John Dos Passos

26. “When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody’s embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.”

— John Dos Passos

27. “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.”

— John Dos Passos

28. “I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don’t.”

— John Dos Passos

29. “The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.”

— John Dos Passos

30. “If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I’d have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven’t even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.”

— John Dos Passos

31. “A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts...”

— John Dos Passos

32. “Shakespeare wouldn’t have been any good if he’d stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.”

— John Dos Passos

33. “Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.”

— John Dos Passos

34. “One phrase stuck in Fainy’s mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.”

— John Dos Passos

35. “A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”

— John Dos Passos

36. “When I was a kid I used to tell myself the moon was a silver gong and if I could climb high enough to beat on it with both hands all my wishes would come true.”

— John Dos Passos

37. “With people who are young and aren’t scared you can do lots.”

— John Dos Passos

38. “That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”

— John Dos Passos

39. “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.”

— John Dos Passos

40. “Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.”

— John Dos Passos

41. “A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.”

— John Dos Passos

42. “A man’s got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.”

— John Dos Passos

43. “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.”

— John Dos Passos

44. “Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.”

— John Dos Passos

45. “Mealtime’s the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.”

— John Dos Passos

46. “It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.”

— John Dos Passos

47. “There are too many “creative writing” courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.”

— John Dos Passos

48. “Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.”

— John Dos Passos

49. “It’s easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.”

— John Dos Passos

50. “I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist’s complaint about society is always that it doesn’t measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.”

— John Dos Passos