The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth . . . we have clowns among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as Jack Dempsey is above the paralytic—and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds.
Nowhere in the world is superiority more easily attained, or more eagerly admitted. The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.
The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.
There’s no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self-reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word-mongers, uplifters.
Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian business man.
I simply can’t imagine competence as anything save admirable, for it is very rare in this world, and especially in this great Republic, and those who have it in some measure, in any art or craft from adultery to zoology, are the only human beings I can think of who will be worth the oil it will take to fry them in Hell.
The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.
Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
This place [Hollywood] is the true and original arse-hole of creation. The movie dogs, compared with the rest of the population, actually seem like an ancient Italian noblesse.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
The California climate makes the sick well and the well sick, the old young and the young old.
In southern California the vegetables have no flavor and the flowers have no smell.
Los Angeles seems an inconceivably shoddy place . . . a pasture foreordained for the cow-town evangelism of a former sideshow wriggler.
[Los Angeles:] Nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
Maine is as dead, intellectually, as Abyssinia. Nothing is ever heard from it.
The New England shopkeepers and theologians never really developed a civilization; all they ever developed was a government. They were, at their best, tawdry and tacky fellows, oafish in manner and devoid of imagination.
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
The trouble with New York is that it has no nationality at all. It is simply a sort of free port—a place where the raw materials of civilization are received, sorted out, and sent further on.
For all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it [the South] is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.
[Texas is] the place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least.