E. B. White Quotes

"Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one."

"Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts."

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."

"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."

"Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men."

"We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry."

"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time."

"The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind."

"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."

"A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus."

"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar."

"The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people."

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."

"I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright."

"Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19."

"Be obscure clearly."

"One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy."

"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street."

"I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat."

"When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad."

"There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement."

"The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war."

"I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel."

"It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members."

"The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it."

"Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim."

"The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it."

"Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor."