“You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn’t like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I’ve been trying to change it ever since.”

The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.

Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.

Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.

American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.

It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little comer of the high mansions of the sky.

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.

The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art’s sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore – and then there will be time enough for art.

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.

I just put on what the lady says. I’ve been married three times, so I’ve had lots of supervision.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.

I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do, they will find two words there- ‘social justice.’ For that is what I have believed in and fought for.

But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure – such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.