Humilities are piled on a soldier… so in order that he may, when the time comes, be not too resentful of the final humility – a meaningless and dirty death.
John Steinbeck Quotes
“Yeah, but you ain’t got a sin on your soul like me.” Casy said gently, “Sure I got sins. Ever’body got sins. A sin is somepin you ain’t sure about. Them people that’s sure about ever’thing an’ ain’t got no sin – well, with that kind of son-of-a-bitch, if I was God I’d kick their […]
“Well,” said Casy, “for anybody else it would be a mistake, but if you think it was a sin – then it’s a sin. A fella builds his own sins right up from the groun’.”
On San Francisco: . . .this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge […]
There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity […]
It is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal. Its politics are used to frighten children. Its traffic is madness. Its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it – once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no other place is good enough.
The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant.
The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strenghten and knit the repressed.
I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security – out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
