Philip Wylie Quotes

So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase: 'I knew, I never got it said.

It dawned upon everybody that Aggie, at perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds and five feet nine and a half, was, as Beth later said, 'dynamite in the physical culture department.

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."
The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the truck was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful.
There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.
Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize.

Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft.

God must hate common people, because he made them so common.

They are afraid. They would, today, keep secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it into limbo - their kind. To limbo.

The businessmen have corrupted liberty by trying to propose it as a material quality.

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion.

Faith's the agreement to abandon detachment, John! To supplant a packaged security for open integrity. To agree not to learn anymore. It is the acceptance of a channel, by a man who was previously able to move on the whole terrain

The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so is the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind.

There is no advance without strife.

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.