"What is it that prevents me from being a doctor and a writer? I think it is not our privations or our wanderings or our unsettled lives, but the prevalent spirit of high-flown rhetoric, which has spread everywhere-phrases such as 'the dawn of the future,' 'the building of a new world,' 'the torch-bearers of mankind.' The first time you hear such talk you think 'What breadth of imagination, what richness!' But in fact it's so pompous just because it is so unimaginative and second-rate.
