Philip Wylie

Writer

1902-05-12

Quotes by 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.

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• 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 trick 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.

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• 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.

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• 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 trick 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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• Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

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• One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

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