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.
BEN HECHTI ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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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.
BEN HECHT -
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
BEN HECHT -
The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
BEN HECHT -
In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
BEN HECHT -
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 HECHT -
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
BEN HECHT -
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
BEN HECHT -
A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief.” If he is wise he has not been impoverished. Nor has the fool been enriched. The thief flatters us by stealing. We flatter him by complaining.
BEN HECHT -
Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
BEN HECHT -
I have known a number of Don Juans who were good studs and who cavorted between the sheets without a psychiatrist to guide them. But most of the busy love-makers I knew were looking for masculinity rather than practicing it. They were fellows of dubious lust.
BEN HECHT -
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.
BEN HECHT -
The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can’t have both.
BEN HECHT -
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent.
BEN HECHT -
They’re a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time – and they’re phonies, all of them. And I head the list…their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.
BEN HECHT -
I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
BEN HECHT