Great Throughts Treasury

"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."

"Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully."

"Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind."

"A smile is the universal welcome."

"A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything."

"It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor."

"History is not an escalator."

"It seems obvious to me now – though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion – that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free-and-equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market."

"The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force."

"People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo."

"I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while."

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."

"Living well is the best revenge.If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door."

"A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke."

"A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go."

"Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance."

"Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails."

"Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together."

"The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them."

"Laughter puts your brain, your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play."