John Dos Passos People Quotations

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.

A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts...

Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?

U.S.A. is the speech of the people

People do not choose a career; the career envelopes them.

The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.

But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.