"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."
Doe quotes
Doe
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Doe quotes (page 164 of 564)
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"Poverty does not produce unhappiness: It produces degradation."
"If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may as well not say it at all because people will not trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them."
"When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically... but that does not justify him in pretending...that Christ is, in effect, Mars."
"They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank."
"He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it."
"Like on the airlines, they say they want to 'pre-board'. Well, what the hell is 'pre board'? What does that mean? To get on before you get on?"
"An outsider longing to be on the inside is the same as the soloist longing to work in an ensemble. I get great satisfaction in being a part of the proper - for me - community. I'm uncomfortable with various social groupings and clusterings. But when I'm in the right group, doing the right thing, I get as much satisfaction out of that as anyone who does it all the time."
"As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love - when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them."
"Life's a vast sea That does its mighty errand without fail, Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing."
"What does a mirror look at?"
"When a man forgets himself, he usually does something everybody else remembers."
"Even where there is talent, culture, knowledge, if there is not earnestness, it does not go to the root of things."
"Now, however, I see the folly of attempting to hitch one's wagon to a star with a harness that does not belong to it."
"The best of the sport is to doe the deede, and say nothing."
"Thornes whiten yet doe nothing."
"Who would doe ill ne're wants occasion."
"Who paies the Physitian, does the cure."
"But who does hawk at eagles with a dove?"
"Better suffer ill, then doe ill. [Better suffer ill, than do ill.]"