Philip Wylie Quotes & Sayings

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft. — Philip Wylie

The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so is the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind. — Philip Wylie

Education is not a function of any church or even of a city or a state; it is a function of all mankind . — Philip Wylie

Man's destiny lies half within himself, half without. To advance in either half at the expense of the other is literally insane. — Philip Wylie

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not. — Philip Wylie

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy. — Philip Wylie

The businessmen have corrupted liberty by trying to propose it as a material quality. — Philip Wylie

It dawned upon everybody that Aggie, at perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds and five feet nine and a half, was, as Beth later said, 'dynamite in the physical culture department. — Philip Wylie

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion. — Philip Wylie

Light was the symbol I tried to give them...The Cross was the symbol they adopted. The pain of self-sacrifice was obvious to them. The subjective reward--incomprehensible. Thus they changed it all. I told them of many mansions. They chose this mansion or that--scoured each other off the earth, to set one heaven in place of the heaven of those they defeated. Holy wars! Is such a thing conceivable to God as a holy war? Alas. The words--the images--the effort is still uncomprehended. I said Light. I said truth. I said Freedom. I meant enlightenment. Yet nearly every church that uses my name is a wall against light and a rampart against enlightenment, using fear, not love, to chain the generations in terror and pain and ignorance . . . And now--this is called civilization, and in my name, also! — Philip Wylie

A thought that had been in the archives of his mind for many months came sharply into relief: of all human beings alive, the scientists were the only ones who retained imagination, ideals, and a sincere interest in the larger world. It was to them he should give his allegiance, not to the statesmen, not to industry or commerce or war. — Philip Wylie

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen. — Philip Wylie

There is no advance without strife. — Philip Wylie

But you don't know how to read anymore! When you open a book, you do it in the faith and assurances that you are already master of what it contains and that the author has written only so you may prove him wrong! — Philip Wylie

God must hate common people, because he made them so common. — Philip Wylie

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930) — Philip Wylie

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow. — Philip Wylie

So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase: 'I knew, I never got it said. — Philip Wylie

They are afraid. They would, today, keep secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it into limbo - their kind. To limbo. — Philip Wylie

Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken — Philip Wylie

An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."
The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the truck was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful.
There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.
Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize. — Philip Wylie

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve. — Philip Wylie

I don't like people
much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former. — Philip Wylie

But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national. — Philip Wylie

Faith's the agreement to abandon detachment, John! To supplant a packaged security for open integrity. To agree not to learn anymore. It is the acceptance of a channel, by a man who was previously able to move on the whole terrain — Philip Wylie

A few suits of clothes, some money in the bank, and a new kind of fear constitute the main differences between the average American today and the hairy men with clubs who accompanied Attila to the city of Rome. — Philip Wylie

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache. — Philip Wylie

Absolute dominion of a powerful people by a minority always produces national aggression. — Philip Wylie