“Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.”

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

People read fiction for emotion-not information

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

So that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne’er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics!

What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues.

Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities.

Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

Astonishingly, not all girls get dressed just to please men.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.