Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind. - John Dos Passos

Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.

[Hemingway] always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.