J.M. August Quotes
Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.
The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.
It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.
The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.
Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.
Carbon is, as may easily be shown and as I shall explain in greater detail later, tetrabasic or tetratomic, that is 1 atom of carbon = C = 12 is equivalent to 4 At.H.
I hate nothing more than sugary photographs with tricks, poses and effects. So allow me to be honest ?and tell the truth about our age and its people.
Family . . . the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
People are constantly clamoring for the joy of life. As for me, I find the joy of life in the hard and cruel battle of life - to learn something is a joy to me.
My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
I dont write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but thats not why I write.
I don't go by what the law say. The law's liable to say anything. I go by if it's right or not. It don't matter what the law say. I take and look at it for myself.
Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?
You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.
Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.
When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.
Now, it's common knowledge that most towns of a certain size have a witch, if only to eat misbehaving children and the occasional puppy who wanders into her yard.
The window shades have all been removed. Nighttime is now free to encroach.
The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.
Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism.
Meeting each other and leaving each other. Leaving and meeting. That's what life is!
When people refuse to speak out for too long, it's like water that's stagnant and starts to rot!
Every individual alive today, even the very highest, is to be derived in an unbroken line from the first and lowest forms.
I would trade all my experimental works for the single idea of the benzene theory.
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
... I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind'
The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.
There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.
Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.
The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.