James A. Michener Men Quotations

The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle.

If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

As a younger man I wrote for eight years without ever earning a nickel which is a long apprenticeship, but in that time I learned a lot about my trade.

When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I'm going to live as if I were a great man.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.

[The church's] job is to provide permanent solace and spiritual leadership to the people as a whole, whatever their government at the moment, so long as it stays within the bounds of moral decency.

I don't know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss, but you live with that loss.

organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.

They were a group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.

. . . Luddites were those frenzied traditionalists of the early 19th century who toured [England] wrecking new weaving machines on the theory that if they were destroyed . . . old jobs and old ways of life could be preserved . . . At certain times in his life each man is tempted to become a Luddite, for there is always something he would like to go back to. But to be against all change-against change in the abstract-is folly.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.