Howard Fast Quotes & Sayings

Computers: he always fixed on computers when his mind wandered into the future
instruments he revered and hated. The computer world was a place where snotty kids knew everything and nothing ... The computer was part of a future cloudy, unpredictable and menacing. — Howard Fast

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse. — Howard Fast

Either you get a chance to be a kid when you are a kid, or you don't grow up. — Howard Fast

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind. — Howard Fast

You seem damn sure of yourself for a man your age?"
"I am as old as I can be at my age. I don't know very much, but I know the water. — Howard Fast

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel. — Howard Fast

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill. — Howard Fast

The dignity is in the worker, not in the job. — Howard Fast

In L.A., you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you're cheating on your wife. — Howard Fast

Man is a part of God, or else he is a beast; and beasts know love and fear and hate and hunger
but not exultation — Howard Fast

A man who will traduce those who stood with him in battle is not worth much. — Howard Fast

Could be off one of your own boats, Lavette," Whittier said. "The crab I mean." Whittier was hostile, contriving his hostility in witless remarks. Dan said nothing, only thinking that if this small, pompous, foolish man, so uninformed about the essence of his own business, was a measure of the hundred tycoons who ruled the hills of San Francisco, then his own way up would be none too difficult. It came down to money; if you had money, you functioned and you could do without guts or brains; and if you had money, you saw a girl like Jean Sheldon more than once, more than by accident. — Howard Fast

He found himself smiling and talking politely to people who desired to show their respect and admiration for his uniform-instead of ignoring them and turning away. His sense of separation from and annoyance with these men and women who talked so glibly of war and who had not the faintest notion of what war was ebbed away; and he began to accept the fact that to chatter nonsense with neither knowledge nor perception was the ordinary manner of mankind. — Howard Fast

I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution. — Howard Fast

To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity. — Howard Fast

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices. — Howard Fast

This experiment may fail, but if it succeeds it can be the most important event of our time
even more important and consequential than this war we have just fought. ( ... ) I had a wife and three children, and they were put to death because a nation of men turned into beasts. I watched that, and I could not have lived through it unless I believed, always, that what can turn into a beast can also turn into a man. We are neither. But if we go to create man, we must be humble. We are the tool, not the craftsman, and if we succeed, we will be less than the result of our work. — Howard Fast

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions. — Howard Fast

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America. — Howard Fast

Geronimo [is] ... an example of our practice of destroying those who oppose us and then honoring them. — Howard Fast

I am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered] — Howard Fast

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion. — Howard Fast

Politicians were beginning to
realize that if one cannot have the glory of successful war on foreign soil, one
can do almost as well by creating a minor replica at home — Howard Fast

Most assuredly Zen is a religion, but it is a religion without scripture, without doctrine or dogma and without sin. — Howard Fast

The easiest way to hide a relationship is not to attempt to hide it. — Howard Fast

He found himself grinning at her. His nervousness had disappeared, and suddenly he had a sense of his own size, his physical strength, his own brains and being. Four years, he had earned his own bread and keep, fended for himself, had not only remained alive and well but had put together a small fishing fleet of his own, and kept it alive and functioning and fought the wind and the weather and met a payroll of eleven men in his crews-and be damned with the lot of them if he'd go into a funk over which spoon or knife to use. — Howard Fast

There is nothing more important than being a man, just a plain, ordinary, human man. I know you think Spartacus is something more than a man. He isn't. If he were, then he wouldn't be any good at all.
There is no great mystery about Spartacus. — Howard Fast

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror. — Howard Fast

When I kissed her, I felt that my heart would tear through my chest for excitement and wonder, and then I felt a good, empty sicknesss, if you can speak of anything in such contradictory terms. — Howard Fast

When military men take over, honest men dance to the strings they pull.
Your life is no longer your own. — Howard Fast

Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life. — Howard Fast

The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime. — Howard Fast

Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance-whatever — Howard Fast

Only people who suffer show the ravages of age. — Howard Fast

The revolution goes on; a man does not make the revolution, not a thousand men, not an army and not a party; the revolution comes from the people as they reach toward God, and a little of God is in each person and each will not forget it. This it is the revolution when slaves shake their chains and the revolution when a strong man bends toward a weaker and says, "Here, comrade, is my arm." The revolution goes on and nothing stops it; but because the people are seeking what is good, not what is wicked or powerful or cruel or rich or venal, but simply what is good
because of that the people flounder and feel along one dark road after another. The people no more all-seeing than their rulers once were; it is in intention that they differ. — Howard Fast

In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy. — Howard Fast

I am a Zen Buddhist - but that is not to be thought of as a religion in — Howard Fast

Like most thoughtful people who watch what's going on in Washington, venting is very necessary. — Howard Fast

Let us say that kindness costs me so little and rewards me well. — Howard Fast

Your life is nothing, just a little makeshift that you play with for a while, a machine that you put to use. And if something cracks it, then it's cracked, that's all. — Howard Fast

I suppose I have cause you grief and misery at times, but I have never intentionally caused you embarrassment and discomfort. — Howard Fast

Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday. — Howard Fast

Politics, as he occasionally said, required three unchanging talents and
no virtues. More politicians, he claimed, had been destroyed by virtue than by any other cause; and the talents he enumerated in this fashion. The first talent was the ability to choose the winning side. Failing that, the second talent was the ability to extricate oneself from the losing side. And the third talent was never to make an enemy. — Howard Fast

I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee. — Howard Fast

And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens. — Howard Fast

Will you keep this?" he asked, holding up the pendant. "Please. Don't show it to your folks. But keep it, please. I'm not asking for anything else. You're going away. God knows when I'll see you again. I can accept what you say about your feelings for me. I have to. But what harm will it do if you take this, and then at least, I'll know that something I got for you is with you. — Howard Fast

The first rule is never to split your forces unless it is necessary to survival. The second rule is to attack if you are going to fight, and if you are not going to attack, avoid battle. The third rule is to choose the time and place of battle and never leave that choice to the enemy. The fourth rule is to avoid encirclement at all cost. And the final rule is to attack and destroy the enemy where he is weakest. — Howard Fast

I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter. — Howard Fast