The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
BEN HECHTI have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.
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Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
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I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
BEN HECHT -
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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.
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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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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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That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
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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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There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
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Love is a hole in the heart.
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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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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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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.
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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.
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There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.
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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.
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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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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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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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I 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.
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For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
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The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can’t have both.
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As an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
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Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.
BEN HECHT