Best 25 quotes of Philip Wylie on MyQuotes

Absolute dominion of a powerful people by a minority always produces national aggression.

A few suits of clothes, some money in the bank, and a new kind of fear constitute the main differences between the average American today and the hairy men with clubs who accompanied Attila to the city of Rome.

But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

Education is not a function of any church or even of a city or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

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

I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.

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.

Man's destiny lies half within himself, half without. To advance in either half at the expense of the other is literally insane.

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

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

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

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

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

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

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

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 trick 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.

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.

A thought that had been in the archives of his mind for many months came sharply into relief: of all human beings alive, the scientists were the only ones who retained imagination, ideals, and a sincere interest in the larger world. It was to them he should give his allegiance, not to the statesmen, not to industry or commerce or war.

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.

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.