Ilka Chase Quotes

The only people who never fail are those who never try

You can always spot a well informed man his views are the same as yours.

Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.

Among famous traitors of history one might mention the weather.

America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man.

To me travel is triple delight: anticipation, performance, and recollection.

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

I think it is every woman's duty to make herself as attractive as her time and means permit. After all, there you are, in your person- a living symbol of the progress of art, science and imagination. To be as attractive as we can be is almost a civic duty; there are so many sad and ugly things in the world that I think women should say to themselves humbly, not with vanity, 'I will try to be as pretty as I can, so that when people look at me, they will feel refreshed. I will make an effort to be easy on the eye.'

Keeping your coat on indoors in Russia, no matter how public the place, is far worse than keeping your hat on as the flag goes by. It is worse than going into a Catholic church in Spain with your upper arms bare. It is worse than telling a mother her baby bores you.

When he said we were trying to make a fool of him, I could only murmur that the Creator had beat us to it.

The very fact that we make such a to-do over golden weddings indicates our amazement at human endurance. The celebration is more in the nature of a reward for stamina.

when men don't like another man everyone assumes he's no good and that the men know what they are talking about, yet when women dislike another woman people just think they're being catty.

People are subject to moods, to temptations and fears, lethargy and aberration and ignorance, and the staunchest qualities shift under the stresses and strains of daily life.

On the whole, I haven't found men unduly loath to say, 'I love you.' The real trick is to get them to say, 'Will you marry me?

Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.

Wart hogs should sue for libel. It is a terrible name and they are fine fellows and devoted family men and it is rare to see one by himself; the little woman and the kiddies are usually close at hand.

I always felt that the boiled potato, not the tudor rose, should be the national emblem.

Prolonged statistics are a lethal dose, which if it does not kill will certainly dispel your audience.

All the humiliating, tragicomic, heartbreaking things happened to me in my girlhood, and nothing makes me happier than to realize I cannot possibly relive my youth.

Love at a distance may be poignant; it is also idealized. Contact, more than separation, is the test of attachment.

in love, gallantry is necessary. Even when the first wild desire is gone, especially then, there is an inherent need for good manners and consideration, for the putting forth of effort. Two courteous and civilized human beings out of the loneliness of their souls owe that to each other.

Believe me, nothing is so calculated to lose you audience sympathy as too many tears. Move your listeners all you can but let them do the crying.

The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.

We've surrounded the most vital and commonplace human function with a vast morass of taboos, convention, hypocrisy, and plain claptrap.

everything you experience is what constitutes you as a human being, but the experience passes away and the person's left. The person is the residue.

There are three things the prospective traveler to Russia does well to bear in mind. One: It is their country. Two: Most foreigners are profoundly relieved that this is so. Three: You don't have to go.

Like building a house, travel always costs more than you estimate.

That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.

Young people want to look like peas in a pod, and there is no use trying to make them different.

Intellect alone is a dry and rattling thing.

I've got a heart like a college prom. Each one I dance with seems the best of all.

Next to a good meal and possibly a long night's sleep the greatest morale builder ... is clothes.

Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.

George Moore unexpectedly pinched my behind. I felt rather honored that my behind should have drawn the attention of the great master of English prose.

I suppose anyone who has ever written a travel book has had the experience of being accosted by a reader with blood in his eye and a lawsuit in his voice.

When traveling abroad if you see something you yearn for if you can afford it at all, buy it. If you don't you'll regret it all your life.

Very few people, thank God, look like the pictures of them which are published in the papers and the weekly magazines.

It occurred to me that we live in a lunatic world where the only way to maintain peace is to have an enormous war-making machine.

Between frivolity and intentional mischief there is little difference, none in the results.

The advertising agency, as it stands today, is a peculiar manifestation of American business life of the twentieth century - glossy, brash, and insecure.

Neither an assembly line nor a stock market nor an oil well did it, simply what came from one small skull and that one right hand.