Philip Wylie Quotations

I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken

There is no advance without strife.

Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.

The businessmen have corrupted liberty by trying to propose it as a material quality.

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

God must hate common people, because he made them so common.

A few suits of clothes, some money in the bank, and a new kind of fear constitute the main differences between the average American today and the hairy men with clubs who accompanied Attila to the city of Rome.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.