J.M. August Quotes

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.

Friendship can only exist between persons with similar interests and points of view. Man and woman by the conventions of society are born with different interests and different points of view.

If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor [with which] it is now favoring feudalism and slavery.

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization.

If there weren't so many professors, medicine would be much easier.

Whole libraries can be filled with the papers written about cancer and its causes, but the contents of these papers fit on one little library visiting card.

Originally a pupil of Liebig, I became a pupil of Dumas, Gerhardt and Williamson: I no longer belonged to any school.

Photography has no dark sides!

I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.

Oh, I have loved him too much to feel no hate for him.

It's wonderful how, the moment you talk about God and love, your voice becomes hard, and your eyes fill with hatred. No, Margret, you certainly haven't the true faith.

When people drink, they talk, and talk is dangerous!

I always disliked dogs, those protectors of cowards who lack the courage to fight an assailant themselves.

He saw the cause of his unhappiness in the family--the family as a social institution, which does not permit the child to become an independent individual at the proper time.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

The grave is a very small hillock, but we can see farther from it, when standing on it, than from the highest mountain in all the world.

True love is deemed to be the most tender of our emotions, as even the blind and deaf know; but I know, what few believe, that true friendship is more tender still.

That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

I ain't never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start over. It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.

Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.

Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It's hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.

I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

Those not favorable to the money trust could be squeezed out of business and the people frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws which the Money Trust would frame.

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately "create the future of mankind." This is the final conclusion of the forty years which I have now devoted to the study of these problems

Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success

If democracy is a means rather than an end, its limits must be determined in the light of the purpose we want it to serve.

Without a theory the facts are silent.

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.

The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.

Liberty'''.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.

We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.

It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.

The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig-with the stress on the "old.

In the meanest hut is a romance, if you knew the hearts there.

I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.

Joy is a strength; intoxication, a weakness.

The Dance is an art because it demands vocation, knowledge, and ability.

The beauty to which the Dance ought to aspire

The making of art is a profoundly social activity, even if it’s one-on-one with some sort of ideal reader who doesn’t exist.

It's risky to take anything on good faith where a woman is concerned.

In the old days, one married a wife; now one forms a company with a female partner, or moves in to live with a friend. And then one seduces the partner, or defiles the friend.

I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.

[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.

From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.

As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.