“Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.”

Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.

With your great experience, don’t you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes.

Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.

And that the pastor’s sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which ‘did a fellow good– kept him in touch with Higher Things.

In everything was the spirit of children’s play – not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.

Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it’s still just work.

I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want — and what I want now is a drink.

We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?

Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

An it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires – though a lot of churches are that, too.

When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.

I had the Buffalo shoes, a customised Baby Spice necklace – when I say custom-made, it was made out of plastic from the local mall – and a Union Jack dress.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD.

The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow – so arbitrary are these transient laws.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved.

To bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn … seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime.

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.