Gerald Stanley Lee Quotes

Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.

The new industrial world is coming to us one new free-born industry at a time.

The idea ... that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked. We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a whole.

We may have hell if we have war, and we may have hell if we have peace. But if we have no vision for what we do, we have hell anyway.

I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.

Machinery makes men like itself.

A vice is a failure of desire

When America has been discovered in America it will be discovered in Europe. They are looking for America now.

The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

America is a tune. It must be sung together.

I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.

What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.

There are two kinds of second class men in business. There is the man who puts money first and service second. There is the man who puts service first and money second, who never has any money. The first class man in business is the man who is made up out of rolling the other two kinds into one man and working them together.

Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

To be original is to discover the commonplace of a thousand years
to face at first the sneer that no one would have thought of it, and at last the indifference because any one would.

Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured today by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for
the centre of mass.