Top 80 John Dos Passos Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Print so easily spins a web of the commonplace over the fine outlines of life.”

— John Dos Passos

52. “It’s almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you.”

— John Dos Passos

53. “But what’s the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.”

— John Dos Passos

54. “Walt Whitman’s a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I’ve ever heard of.”

— John Dos Passos

55. “So many Americans felt that their neighbor had no right to know more than they did.”

— John Dos Passos

56. “Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher’s apron who had a baseball cap on backwards.”

— John Dos Passos

57. “Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.”

— John Dos Passos

58. “Letters are largely written to get things out of your system.”

— John Dos Passos

59. “A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.”

— John Dos Passos

60. “What’s the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.”

— John Dos Passos

61. “If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.”

— John Dos Passos

62. “Men seemed to have shrunk in stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper in slavery. Whichever won, tyranny from above, or spontaneous organization from below, there could be no individuals. He.”

— John Dos Passos

63. “The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armour of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.” -John Dos Passos.”

— John Dos Passos

64. “If there are no permanent standards, there is no criticism possible.”

— John Dos Passos

65. “Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on a land essentially centrifugal.”

— John Dos Passos

66. “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?”

— John Dos Passos

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

— John Dos Passos

68. “There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That’s why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.”

— John Dos Passos

69. “I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.”

— John Dos Passos

70. “Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real.”

— John Dos Passos

71. “Everything published goes down the same chute out of the overbright glare of publicity into oblivion.”

— John Dos Passos

72. “The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets;.”

— John Dos Passos

73. “He was one of the grand old men until the churches and the congregations got wind that he was an infidel and believed in Darwin. Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil, selecting improved hybrids for America those sunny years in Santa Rosa. But he brushed down a wasp’s nest that time; he wouldn’t give up Darwin and Natural Selection and they stung him and he died puzzled.”

— John Dos Passos

74. “Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I’d like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That’s the only sublime thing.”

— John Dos Passos

75. “I’m going to drink till when I cut myself whiskey runs out. What’s the good of blood when you can have whiskey?”

— John Dos Passos

76. “That’s very nice of you George. Isn’t it amazing the way girls are getting to look more like Mrs. Castle every day? Just look round this room.”

— John Dos Passos

77. “Oh I know darling, it’s nothing but money in New York.”

— John Dos Passos

78. “The old Romans knew better; to keep people quiet they filled their bellies.”

— John Dos Passos

79. “If only I still had faith in words.”

— John Dos Passos

80. “Too goddam many lawyers mixed up in this. Run the sonsobitches out. If they resists shoot ’em, that’s what I says to the Governor, but they’re all these sonsobitches a lawyers fussin’ everythin’ up all the time with warrants and habeas corpus and longwinded rigmarole. My ass to habeas corpus.”

— John Dos Passos

81. “No, you are saying to yourselves what a bore he is, what use is he to society? He has no money, he has no pretty wife, no good conversation, no tips on the stockmarket. He’s a useless fardel on society... The artist is a fardel.”

— John Dos Passos

82. “Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant’s Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.”

— John Dos Passos

83. “What good? I’ll bury them back there in the court and wait. I’ll need them in the end. D’you know what it’ll mean, your revolution? Another system! When there’s a system there are always men to be bought with diamonds. That’s what the world’s like.” “But they won’t be worth anything. It’ll only be work that is worth anything.” “We’ll see,” said the Chink.”

— John Dos Passos

84. “But the man with the knowhow, the boy who thinks up the gadgets, they can’t put him out. I can outsmart ‘em at their own game too. We got somethin’ bigger down here than they ever dreamed of. And the Administration all fixed up. This is goin’ to be big, little girl, the biggest thing you ever saw and I’m goin’ to let you in on it. We’ll be on easystreet from now on. And when you’re on easystreet you’ll all forget poor old Charley Anderson the boy that put you wise.”

— John Dos Passos

85. “The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked thought.”

— John Dos Passos

86. “Chrisfield looked straight ahead of him. He did not feel lonely any more now that he was marching in ranks again. His feet beat the ground in time with the other feet. He would not have to think whether to go to the right or to the left. He would do as the others did.”

— John Dos Passos

87. “And don’t forget this, if a man’s a success in New York, he’s a success!”

— John Dos Passos

88. “Golly, I could drink a cup of coffee,” said Mac. “We’ll have swell coffee in Seattle, damned if we won’t, Mac.”

— John Dos Passos

89. “That is Baroja’s world: dismal, ironic, the streets of towns where industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to it as any in Europe.”

— John Dos Passos