John Mason Brown Quotes

He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.

Friendship should be a private pleasure, not a public boast. I loathe those braggarts who are forever trying to invest themselves with importance by calling important people by their first names in or out of print. Such first-naming for effect makes me cringe.

No man, with a man's heart in him gets far on his way without some bitter, soul-searching disappointment. Happy is he who is brave enough to push on to another stage of the journey.

Charm is a glow within a woman which casts a most becoming light on others.

Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.

The comic book is the marijuana of the nursery, the bane of the bassinet, the horror of the home, the curse of the kids and a threat to the future.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.

Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend, and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth.

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

America is a land where men govern, but women rule.

Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes.

To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

What happiness is, no person can say for another. But no one, I am convinced, can be happy who lives only for himself. The joy of living comes from immersion in something that we know to be bigger, better, more enduring and worthier than we are.

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.

Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

Most people spend most of their days doing what they do not want to do in order to earn the right, at times, to do what they may desire.

The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.

What a man is is the basis owhat he dreams and thinks, accepts and rejects, feels and perceives.

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.

The more one has seen of the good, the more one asks for the better.

I am ready any time. Do not keep me waiting.

No one is worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause.

I have lived long enough to be battered by the realities of life, and not too long to be downed by them.

So much of TV seems to be chewing gum for the eyes.... TV desperately needs more self-reliance and pride in the medium.

Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you...It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning.

God spare me sclerosis of the curiosity, for the curiosity which craves to keep us informed about the small things no less than the large is the mainspring, the dynamo, the jet propulsion of all complete living.