Optimism is cowardice.

Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.

If you are clever enough to figure out what men want, you are either too wise to marry them or too intimidating for them to marry you.

The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.

One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.