"He is so stupid you can't trust him with an idea."
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John Steinbeck quotes (page 15 of 35)
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"Sir, this is a unique dog. He does not live by tooth or fang. He respects the right of cats to be cats although he doesn't admire them. He turns his steps rather than disturb an earnest caterpillar. His greatest fear is that someone will point out a rabbit and suggest that he chase it. This is a dog of peace and tranquility."
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"The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental."
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"People like you to be something, preferably what they are."
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"I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless."
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"In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms"
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"In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration."
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"When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror."
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"There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do."
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"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
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"[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."
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"People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it."
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"I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept."
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"One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture."
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"Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars."
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"We could live offa the fatta the lan'."
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"It seems to me Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda."
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"I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction."
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"She wasn't happy, but then she wasn't unhappy. She wasn't anything. But I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream."
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"Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."
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