I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.
BEN HECHTPeople’s sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
More Ben Hecht Quotes
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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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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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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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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
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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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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.
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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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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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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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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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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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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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.
BEN HECHT