His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.

My objection to the church isn't that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too - think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. An it isn't so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires - though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.