Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.
BEN HECHTThe only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
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Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him.
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I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life’s hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are.
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Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.
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When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women’s hair rhapsodically described, women’s faces acclaimed in odelike language.
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I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
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Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.
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Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent.
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A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
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Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
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H.L.Mencken’s war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.
BEN HECHT