Marya Mannes Quotes
The New York voice reflects its diversity, its foreignness, and, inevitably, the sense of superiority New Yorkers feel or come to feel. It says, without saying, We Know.
A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.
Know the difference between Giant and Jumbo? Between two-ounce and a big two-ounce? Between a quart and a full quart? What's a tall 24-inch? What does Extra Long mean? Who's kidding who?
Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.
In our long and obsessive passion for youth, we have - more than any other modern society - avoided direct approach to age and to dying by denying them in word, in fact, and - above all - in worth.
It is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.
The real demon is success-the anxieties engendered by this quest are relentless, degrading, corroding. What is worse, there is no end to this escalation of desire.
The suppression of civil liberties is too many less a matter for horror than the curtailment of the freedom to profit.
Human progress had so often been checked by those who were afraid of losing what they had.
There is nothing harder to come by than detachment and solitude; and nothing more important.
The right to choose death when life no longer holds meaning is not only the next liberation but the last human right.
I would call an intellectual one whose instrument of work - his mind - is also his major source of pleasure; a man whose entertainment is his intelligence.
certain kinds of people become Republicans and certain kinds of people become Democrats, and ... it's more than a matter of party affiliation. It's a way of thinking and being.
A man at his desk in a room with a closed door is a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available.
Until we know what motivates the hearts and minds of men we can understand nothing outside ourselves, nor will we ever reach fulfillment as that greatest miracle of all, the human being.
For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.
An American who can make money, invoke God, and be no better than his neighbor, has nothing to fear but truth itself.
To lead means to direct and to exact, and no man dares do either - he might be unpopular. What authority we are given now is a trinity: the grin, the generality, and God (the Word).
It is a marvellous thing to be physically a woman if only to know the marvels of a man.
A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.
The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.
To lead means to direct and to exact and no man dares do either - he might be unpopular. What authority we are given now is a trinity: the grin the generality and God (the Word).
The process of maturing is an art to be learned an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are and if it is good it is better than your youth.
It is privilege of living to be ... acutely agonizingly conscious of the moment that is always present and always passing.
It is not enough to show people how to live better: there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.
Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.
