Prejudices, Sixth SeriesAlfred A. Knopf, 1927 - 309 pages A popular and influential collection of essays, often humorous and provocative, that addressed many facets of American life at the time. |
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actor Æschylus agents American American Mercury Anti-Saloon League Babbitt Beethoven began believe better Bible Bible Belt Bierce Bill of Rights Billy Sunday Brahms bureaucrats certainly chiropractors Christian citizen civilized common competent Coolidge cracy criminologists damned decent Devil's Dictionary dignity doubt editors eminent eugenists executive secretaries fact fellow Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche gaudy H. L. MENCKEN heard Hell honest human ical ideas imagine imbecility intelligent Johann John Roach Straton journalism journalist late least less live mainly matter ment Methodist morons natural never newspaper obviously once papers pedagogues perhaps poetry poets political preposterous profes professional Republic revolt schools seems sense simply Socialist sort South sure thing tion to-day town true truth trying turned United Valentino waltz whole worse wowsers yearning York young
Fréquemment cités
Page 55 - ... ...What lies behind all this, I believe, is a deep sense of the fundamental antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation...
Page 54 - The average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly that the government is something lying outside him and outside the generality of his fellow men — that it is a separate, independent and often hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable, on occasion, of doing him great harm.
Page 30 - ... unable to distinguish men of sense and dignity from mountebanks. A few clumsy overtures from the White House, and they are rattled and undone. They come in as newspaper men, trained to get the news and eager to get it; they end as tin-horn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write the truth if they tried.
Page 309 - There was an obvious fineness in him; even his clothes were not precisely those of his horrible trade. He began talking of his home, his people, his early youth. His words were simple and yet somehow very eloquent. I could still see the mime before me, but now and then, briefly and darkly, there was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly called, for want of a better name, a gentleman. In brief, Valentino's agony was the agony of a man of relatively civilized...
Page 160 - AM and a Ph.D.; he has professed at the University of Michigan since 1887 and is now professor of rhetoric and journalism there and university editor; he has been president of the Modern Language Association, of the National Council of Teachers of English, of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism; he is a member of the Modern Language...
Page 85 - If you want to find out how a philosopher feels when he is engaged in the practice of his profession, go to the nearest zoo and watch a chimpanzee at the wearying and hopeless job of chasing fleas. Both suffer damnably, and neither can win.
Page 32 - It not only can be done; it has been done. There are dozens of papers in the United States that already show a determined effort to get out of the old slough. Any managing editor in the land, if he has the will, can carry his own paper with them. He is under no compulsion, save rarely, to employ this or that hand; it is not often that owners, or even business managers, take any interest in that business, save to watch the pay-roll. Is the paper trifling, ill-informed, petty and unfair? Is its news...
Page 189 - By the hundreds and thousands these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery. On their deep sides they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides they bury themselves swinishly in the mud. Not a fifth of them are perpendicular. They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases precariously. And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks. Now and then...
Page 150 - It has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a state religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.
Page 196 - The American Public Will Swallow Anything." And then, three weeks later, on June 13, in the same Editorial Section, but promoted to page one, the same Herald reprinted my tenyear-old fake — soberly and as a piece of news!