People From Wisconsin

"The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape."

"I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater."

"The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way."

"Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion."

"The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous...and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight."

"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."

"The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

"Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city."

"Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners — your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards — who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute."

"Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder."

"I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it's a field, or a home, or a country."

"I hate this play and every word in it."

"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate — that's my philosophy."

"I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. ...Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute? ...I'm ready to go back...I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people."

"That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness."

"Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense."

"A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way."

"People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome."

"Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other."

"Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world."

"Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

"Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy."

"The most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope."

"I am not interested in the ephemeral — such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions."

"Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties."

"Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday."

"Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value."

"Many plays — certainly mine — are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them."

"I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island."

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."

"I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility."

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

"We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth."

"To all my friends, colleagues and family: I send you love. Please support me in my passage to a new life. I have no other way to thank you than this. You have all played a significant part in my development of loving. As a result, my life has been rich and full, so I leave feeling very grateful."

"I have often thought had there been somebody like me around, something might have been able to be done. I also think I don't see how I could have done what I've done in the world had I been married. And when I decided-because I've been on the verge of marriage many times-I said no, because if I wanted to roam the globe like I did, it wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be fair to me, it wouldn't be fair to the people. At the point, I really feel it was a kind of destiny because I've been able to get to places. There are some people in the world who have other jobs to do."

"I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen, heard, understood and touched by them. The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand and touch another person. When this is done, I feel contact has been made."

"A growing body of clinical observation has pointed to the conclusion that the family therapy must be oriented to the family as a whole."

"Why Family Therapy?...because it deals with family pain."

"I think if I have one message, one thing before I die that most of the world would know, it would be that the event does not determine how to respond to the event. That is a purely personal matter. The way in which we respond will direct and influence the event more than the event itself."

"Life is not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference."

"One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.'"

"Is science really gaining in its assault on the totality of the unsolved? As science learns one answer, it is characteristically true that it also learns several new questions. It is as though science were working in a great forest of ignorance, making an ever larger circular clearing within which, not to insist on the pun, things are clear... But as that circle becomes larger and larger, the circumference of contact with ignorance also gets longer and longer. Science learns more and more. But there is an ultimate sense in which it does not gain; for the volume of the appreciated but not understood keeps getting larger. We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance."

"I think that God has revealed Himself to many at many times and in many places. Indeed, He continuously reveals Himself to man today : every new discovery of science is a further "revelation" of the order which God has built into His universe."

"Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why."

"In a perfect world an idea could be born, nourished, developed and made known to everyone, criticized and perfected, and put to good use without the crude fact of financial support ever entering in to the process. Seldom, if ever, in the practical world in which we live does this occur."

"Science is not gadgetry."

"Is a virus a living organism? What is a gene, and how does the original genetic constitution of a living organism express itself in the developed characteristics of the adult? Do complex protein molecules "know how" to reduplicate their pattern, and is this an essential clue to the problem of reproduction of living creatures? All these are certainly complex problems, but they are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole. They are all, in the language here proposed, problems of organized complexity."

"The significant problems of living organisms are seldom those in which one can rigidly maintain constant all but two variables. Living things are more likely to present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways. Often they present situations in which the essentially important quantities are either non-quantitative, or have at any rate eluded identification or measurement up to the moment. Thus biological and medical problems often involve the consideration of a most complexly organized whole."

"Science has led to a multitude of results that affect men's lives. Some of these results are embodied in mere conveniences of a relatively trivial sort. Many of them, based on science and developed through technology, are essential to the machinery of modern life. Many other results, especially those associated with the biological and medical sciences, are of unquestioned benefit and comfort. Certain aspects of science have profoundly influenced men's ideas and even their ideals. Still other aspects of science are thoroughly awesome."

"With preparations for war came fears of domestic subversion. The link had been made many times before in US history: the Red Scare after World War I or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II were just recent examples. The public witch hunt against Communists and other Left-wingers in the 1940s and 1950s had equally damaging effects. Charges of disloyalty, most of which were entirely unfounded, drove many knowledgeable and gifted experts away from government service. Joseph McCarthy, the demagogic and hyperbolic Wisconsin senator who through his speeches on the Senate floor came to symbolize anti-Communist paranoia, did more damage to US interests than any of Stalin's covert operations. In February 1950 McCarthy claimed that he had evidence of 205—later corrected to 57—Communists working in the State Department, and denounced the president as a traitor who "sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world." The series of hearings and investigations, which accusations such as McCarthy’s gave rise to, destroyed people's lives and careers. Even for those who were cleared, such as the famous central Asia scholar Owen Lattimore, some of the accusations stuck and made it difficult to find employment. It was, as Lattimore said in his book title from 1950, Ordeal by Slander. For many of the lesser known who were targeted— workers, actors, teachers, lawyers—it was a Kafkaesque world, where their words were twisted and used against them during public hearings by people who had no knowledge of the victims or their activities. Behind all of it was the political purpose of harming the Administration, though even some Democrats were caught up in the frenzy and the president himself straddled the issue instead of publicly confronting McCarthy. McCarthyism, as it was soon called, reduced the US standing in the world and greatly helped Soviet propaganda, especially in western Europe."