Heywood Broun
Full Name: Heywood Campbell Broun Jr.
Birthdate: December 7, 1888
Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Date of Death: December 18, 1939
Occupation: Author, Columnist, Editor, and Journalist
Profile: Founded the American Newspaper Guild.
Website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heywood_Broun
Number of Quotes: 63
A cat is nobody's fool.
A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.
A technical objection is the first refuge of a scoundrel.
All spiritual things must have in them a childlike quality. The belief in immortality rests not very
much on the hope of going on. Few of us want to do that, but we would like very much to begin again.
Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.
Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.
As the dragon charged it released huge clouds of hissing steam through its nostrils. It was almost as if a gigantic teapot had gone mad.
Brotherhood is not just a Bible word. Out of comradeship can come and will come the happy life for all.
Censorship is serious and drastic business; it should never set merely upon guesswork and more particularly not
upon the guesses of men so staunch in morals that they are obviously of distant kin to the rest of humanity.
Criticism has hurt him for he is not insensitive. He is merely inarticulate.
Even the revolutionary writer will err if he fails to grasp the enormous effectiveness of occasional understatement.
Every now and then, we hear parents commenting on the fearful things which motion pictures may do to
the minds of children. They seem to think that a little child is full of sweetness and of light.
Everybody favours free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground.
Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn about holding a baby. There are
one hundred and fifty-two distinctly different ways — and all are right! At least all will do.
For a person in rugged health who is not particularly dressed up and does not want to write a letter or read
the newspaper, we can imagine few diversions more enjoyable than to have a child turned loose upon him.
For the truth there is no deadline.
Free speech is about as good a cause as the world has ever known. But it gets shoved aside in favor of things which
at a given moment seem more vital. Everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground.
Get up and hit a home run,
has never been a part of the usable technique of any manager.
God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.
He had a marvelously versatile gift for forgetting things.
He was of the mold from which great men are made. Having said of anything Let it be
done
he at once felt not only that it was accomplished, but that he had done it himself.
Hell is paved with great granite blocks hewn from the hearts of those who said, I can do no other.
Here you have learned the theories of life... but after all, life is not a matter of theories. Life is a atter of
facts. It calls on the young and the old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard and sometimes unpleasant.
I do know that whenever a player hits the ball out of the park, I have a sense of elation. I feel as if I had done it.
I do not see a necessary connection between proletarian literature and some set percentage of words which bring the blushes to a maiden's cheek.
I doubt whether the world holds for anyone a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream.
I have always held to the theory that too much chalk may be just as bad for a novel as for a knee joint.
In some respects, the life of a censor is more exhilarating than that of an emperor. The best the emperor can do is snip off
the heads of men and women, who are mere mortals. The censor can decapitate ideas which but for him might have lived forever.
Increasingly, it becomes evident that managing a ball club is a psychiatrist's job. In a short series, the mental attitude of the combatants is everything.
It is ridiculous to say that Sacco and Vanzetti are being railroaded to the chair. The situation is much worse than
that. This is a thing done cold-bloodedly and with deliberation. But care and deliberation do not guarantee justice.
Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his
apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great leader who is just entering the room.
Let's see,
mused the dragon, that doesn't tell us much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do
you think?
Gawaine could do no more than nod. Why, of course,
exclaimed the dragon, reactionary Republican.
Life is not a matter of theories. Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and
the old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard and sometimes unpleasant.
Men are blind in their own cause.
Men build bridges and throw railroads across deserts, and yet they contend successfully
that the job of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, they don't have to sew buttons.
Nobody talks so constantly about God as
those who insist that there is no God.
Only Puritans think of the devil as the most fascinating figure in the universe.
People who come up through life or literature the hard way must inevitably carry their scars with them into composition.
Perhaps the most startling reversal of tradition came in the case of Lefty Grove. He shattered the cruel slanders which have always followed lefthanders.
Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anyone else.
Rumplesnitz.
Sports do not build character. They reveal it.
Attribution disputed.
Success is never found. Failure is never fatal. Courage is the only thing.
Sweat is the cologne of accomplishment.
The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.
The artist has never been a dictator, since he understands better than anybody else the variations in human personality.
The average editor cannot escape feeling that telling a writer to do something is almost the same thing as performing it himself.
The belief in immortality rests not very much on the hope of going on. Few of us want to do that, but we would like very much to begin again.
The body of the Unknown Soldier has come home, but his spirit will wander with that of his brothers. There
will be no rest for his soul until the great democracy of death has been translated into the unity of life.
The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin
whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels.
The editorial strategy of the World
is seemingly rested upon the theory that in a
desperate cause, it is well to ask a little less than you hope to get. I think you should ask more.
The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.
The most casual examination will reveal the fact that all the jokes about the horrible results of
masculine cooking and sewing are written by men. It is all part of a great scheme of sex propaganda.
The most prolific period of pessimism comes at twenty-one or thereabouts, when the first attempt is made to translate dreams into reality.
The swaggering underemphasis of New England.
The tradition of professional baseball always has been agreeably free of chivalry. The rule is, Do anything you can get away with.
The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.
The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil.
There is no proselyter half so energetic as the hard-shelled atheist.
We are under no delusions as to the innate goodness even of very small children. They are bad a great deal of the time, but before it has been knocked out of
them, they see no limit to the potentialities of the human will. Theirs is the faith to move mountains, because they do not yet know the fearful heft of them.
We had the same notion until we had a chance to listen intently to the prattle of a three-year-old.
What will you do if I surrender?
he asked. Why, I'll eat you,
said
the dragon. And if I don't surrender?
I'll eat you just the same.
Write the news as if your very life depended on it. It does!
Last on Earth
