John Mason Brown Quotes

#1. Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.

John Mason Brown

#2. Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.

John Mason Brown

#3. So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.

John Mason Brown

#4. No one is worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause.

John Mason Brown

#5. The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.

John Mason Brown

#6. I have lived long enough to be battered by the realities of life, and not too long to be downed by them.

John Mason Brown

#7. He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.

John Mason Brown

#8. How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington as a city that goes around in circles!

John Mason Brown

#9. Friendship should be a private pleasure, not a public boast. I loathe those braggarts who are forever trying to invest themselves with importance by calling important people by their first names in or out of print. Such first-naming for effect makes me cringe.

John Mason Brown

#10. I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

John Mason Brown

#11. The more one has seen of the good, the more one asks for the better.

John Mason Brown

#12. A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.

John Mason Brown

#13. She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life.

John Mason Brown

#14. America is a land where men govern, but women rule.

John Mason Brown

#15. The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

John Mason Brown

#16. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.

John Mason Brown

#17. I am ready any time. Do not keep me waiting.

John Mason Brown

#18. Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you ... It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning ...

John Mason Brown

#19. God spare me sclerosis of the curiosity, for the curiosity which craves to keep us informed about the small things no less than the large is the mainspring, the dynamo, the jet propulsion of all complete living.

John Mason Brown

#20. Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others.

John Mason Brown

#21. Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

John Mason Brown

#22. So much of TV seems to be chewing gum for the eyes ... TV desperately needs more self-reliance and pride in the medium.

John Mason Brown

#23. What a man is is the basis owhat he dreams and thinks, accepts and rejects, feels and perceives.

John Mason Brown

#24. The comic book is the marijuana of the nursery, the bane of the bassinet, the horror of the home, the curse of the kids and a threat to the future.

John Mason Brown

#25. What happiness is, no person can say for another. But no one, I am convinced, can be happy who lives only for himself. The joy of living comes from immersion in something that we know to be bigger, better, more enduring and worthier than we are.

John Mason Brown

#26. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

John Mason Brown

#27. Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes.

John Mason Brown

#28. It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.

John Mason Brown

#29. To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

John Mason Brown

#30. Most people spend most of their days doing what they do not want to do in order to earn the right, at times, to do what they may desire.

John Mason Brown

#31. You were born an original, don't die a copy

John Mason Brown

#32. Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend, and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth.

John Mason Brown