Top 100 Babbitt Quotes
#1. The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.
Sinclair Lewis
#2. We went with the St. Lawrence Experience, which is run by Joe Babbitt, who is a close friend now. We went out there for 10 days and we had the best week of our lives, and we've been going back since. We've been back three times now.
Tom Felton
#3. The idea that our son would be like Raymond Babbitt was a shocking reordering of everything. And something we couldn't quite fathom, really.
Ron Suskind
#4. Right after graduation, I married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, an academic administrator. I spent the next ten years in Connecticut, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., raising our children, Christopher, Tom, and Lucy.
Natalie Babbitt
#5. and after saying good-by to him at the station, Babbitt returned to his office to realize that he faced a world which, without Paul, was meaningless.
Sinclair Lewis
#6. Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.
Rebecca West
#7. Babbitt knew that in this place of death Paul was already dead. And as he pondered on the train home something in his own self seemed to have died: a loyal and vigorous faith in the goodness of the world, a fear of public disfavor, a pride in success.
Sinclair Lewis
#8. His name was George F. Babbitt, and ... he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
Sinclair Lewis
#9. The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport.
Sinclair Lewis
#10. Outside, the night seemed poised on tiptoe, waiting, waiting, holding its breath for the storm.
Natalie Babbitt
#11. A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.
Irving Babbitt
#12. This isn't just about today, this about generations to come. And you've got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he's done it.
Bruce Babbitt
#13. And finally she had sobbed the only truth there was into her mother's shoulder, the only explanation: the Tucks were her friends. She had done it because - in spite of everything, she loved them.
Natalie Babbitt
#14. Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.
Natalie Babbitt
#15. What I finally did in 1995 was I said, I'm going to get out of this town and I'm going to go out West.
Bruce Babbitt
#16. We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.
Irving Babbitt
#17. You've got nothing that lasts, you know. That's not the first town that ever stood there. There was one before that, and one before that, and one before that one, on back for 900 years. But this tree has stood here all along. What do you make of that, boy?
Natalie Babbitt
#18. If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying.
Irving Babbitt
#19. And Winnie, laughing at him, lost the last of her alarm. They were friends, her friends. She was running away after all, but she was not alone. Closing
Natalie Babbitt
#20. And soon they were rolling on again, leaving Treegap behind, and as they went, the tinkling little melody of a music box drifted out behind them and was lost at last far down the road.
Natalie Babbitt
#21. There's a basic kind of tension here. It's between those who say, I'd like to clear cut this forest and reduce it to saw timber because that's an economically productive thing for me to do.
Bruce Babbitt
#22. Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.
Irving Babbitt
#24. [B]elieving, was her own true, promising friend once more.
Natalie Babbitt
#25. That doesn't sound like civil war to me," said Gaylen, turning back to his book with a smile. "It only sounds silly."
"Of course it's silly," said the Prime Minister impatiently. "But a lot of serious things start silly.
Natalie Babbitt
#26. Well, it's not a pleasant experience. And it's a terribly political process, because that thing was initiated by the Congress and by, you know, our adversaries in the Congress.
Bruce Babbitt
#27. Closing the gate on her oldest fears as she had closed the gate of her own fenced yard, she discovered the wings she'd always wished she had.
Natalie Babbitt
#28. I wouldn't miss this opportunity for anything. For the chance to work on these conservation issues, to serve my country, to work for this president, I'd do it all over again, every single minute.
Bruce Babbitt
#29. A fresh breeze lifted Winnie's hair, and from somewhere in the village behind them a dog barked.
Natalie Babbitt
#30. The Northwest is in better shape than it was eight years ago.
Bruce Babbitt
#31. My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school!
Natalie Babbitt
#32. For, through the twilight sounds of crickets and sighing trees, a faint, surprising wisp of music came floating to them and all three turned toward it, toward the wood.
Natalie Babbitt
#33. Look, I think by the time my case was over and other ones, everybody on both sides of the aisle in Congress said we can't run a government by this kind of process and they repealed the law and that's good.
Bruce Babbitt
#34. To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.
Irving Babbitt
#35. Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution.
Irving Babbitt
#36. I have a wonderful husband, and we have had a great life.
Natalie Babbitt
#37. If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
Irving Babbitt
#38. The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
Irving Babbitt
#39. A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.
Irving Babbitt
#40. I think the people will- who advocate having a step back and read those public opinion polls on the front page of the newspapers all over this country saying public supports restoration in restoration of the Everglades, protection of the parks and the creation of monuments.
Bruce Babbitt
#41. A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.
Irving Babbitt
#42. Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.
Irving Babbitt
#43. Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.
Irving Babbitt
#44. It is well to open one's mind but only as a preliminary to closing it ... for the supreme act of judgment and selection.
Irving Babbitt
#45. The way I see it," Miles went on, "it's no good hiding yourself away, like Pa and lots of other people. And it's no good just thinking of your own pleasure, either. People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world.
Natalie Babbitt
#46. What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.
Bruce Babbitt
#47. They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.
Bruce Babbitt
#48. The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope.
Irving Babbitt
#49. The shriek cut thinly though the drizzling dimness, holding for a long moment. At last it broadened and dropped to the old.
Natalie Babbitt
#51. We have an obligation to live in harmony with creation, with our capital ... with God's creation. And we need to administer and work that very carefully.
Bruce Babbitt
#52. I was having that dream again, the good one where we're all in heaven and never heard of Treegap.
Natalie Babbitt
#53. I got a feeling this whole thing is going to come apart like wet bread.
Natalie Babbitt
#54. No kidding. That's really true. You're paying your own bills through this. It's not a pleasant experience.
Bruce Babbitt
#55. What is your suggestion for someone who wants to start writing? Be a reader. It's the only real way to learn how to tell a story.
Natalie Babbitt
#56. You really have to love words if you're going to be a writer, because as a writer, you certainly spend a lot of time with words.
Natalie Babbitt
#57. I write for children because I am interested in fantasy and the possibilities for experience of all kinds before the time of compromise. I believe that children are far more perceptive and wise than American books give them credit for being.
Natalie Babbitt
#58. My mother always found me out. Always. She's been dead for thirty-five years, but I have this feeling that even now she's watching.
Natalie Babbitt
#59. An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
Irving Babbitt
#60. The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.
Irving Babbitt
#61. Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.
Irving Babbitt
#62. Dont be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life.
Natalie Babbitt
#63. Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.
Irving Babbitt
#64. For some, time passes slowly. An hour can seem like an eternity. For others, there was never enough. For Jesse Tuck, it didn't exist.
Natalie Babbitt
#65. I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a book illustrator. I used to hurry home from school and draw.
Natalie Babbitt
#67. We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.
Irving Babbitt
#68. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.
Natalie Babbitt
#69. I look back on it, yeah, I'm in a much worse financial position than I was eight years ago. I'm going to have to go out at age 62 and kind of readdress some of that.
Bruce Babbitt
#70. But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing.
Natalie Babbitt
#71. I would argue that practices that destroy ecosystems always destroy jobs.
Bruce Babbitt
#72. I have always loved astronomy, and being an astronomer once lurked in the back of my mind. But I was never good at algebra. In fact, I flunked it twice in high school.
Natalie Babbitt
#73. The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
Natalie Babbitt
#74. We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important.
Bruce Babbitt
#75. My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.
Natalie Babbitt
#77. The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.
Irving Babbitt
#78. I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.
Milton Babbitt
#80. The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.
Irving Babbitt
#81. He wasn't crazy. How could he be? He was just
amazing. But she was struck dumb. All she could do was stare at him.
Natalie Babbitt
#82. A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.
Irving Babbitt
#83. For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.
Irving Babbitt
#84. Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know ... I think the President has a land protection record that's second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.
Bruce Babbitt
#85. According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.
Irving Babbitt
#86. I had a wonderful mother who wanted my sister and me to have everything, even though money was a very prominent thing we didn't have. But we had a very happy childhood - pretty much ideal, in fact.
Natalie Babbitt
#87. Pretty' doesn't mean 'good,' you know, Geneva. Real life isn't like fairy tales. 'Pretty' simply means that by accident you've got things arranged on your outside in an extra-pleasing manner. It doesn't tell a thing about your inside.
Natalie Babbitt
#88. Music is that great language where a lot can be said and little can be proven.
Milton Babbitt
#90. City parks serve, day in and day out, as the primary green spaces for the majority of Americans.
Bruce Babbitt
#91. Well, I think breathing life into the Endangered Species Act, taking those wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
Bruce Babbitt
#93. Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything including the irresponsible quest of thrills; so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama.
Irving Babbitt
#94. I'm going to go out and get everybody together and say I think we ought to protect this for generations to come. Now, let's get down to work and walk the land and talk about the conflicts and get everybody involved.
Bruce Babbitt
#95. We've set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up.
Bruce Babbitt
#96. Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.
Natalie Babbitt
#97. The sea can swallow ships, and it can spit out whales like watermelon seeds. It will take what it wants, and it will keep what it has taken, and you may not take away from it what it does not wish to give.
Natalie Babbitt
#98. We human beings do a lot of dumb things, and war is certainly the dumbest.
Natalie Babbitt
#99. To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.
Irving Babbitt
#100. Nothing seems interesting when it belongs to you, only when it doesn't.
Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt
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