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“Whenever you hear a prominent American called a ‘Fascist,’ you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS FOR AMERICANISM.”
“When Buzz gets in, he won’t be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That’ll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he’ll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms. Hm.”
so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them,
I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep all our dollars at home.
“But,” said he, “now, after Buzz’s inauguration, everything is going to be completely simple and comprehensible again—the country is going to be run as his private domain!”
He tried to be proud of being a political prisoner. He couldn’t. Jail was jail.
“Is it too late?”
Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
Oh, pardon me! I forgot you were a pacifist.” Doremus grimly muttered, “Not any more!”
“Seventeen? Too many. What I want is mass action by just one member, alone on a hilltop. I’m a great optimist, Karl.
He could not be approached by vulgarians like Mary Greenhill—save in the air, where emperor and vulgarian alike are upheld only by toy wings and by the grace of God.
She found no heroism but only barbaric bestiality in having to kill so that one might so far live as to be halfway honest and kind and secure. But she knew that she would be willing to do it again.
But after eighteen months of Presidency he was angry that Mexico and Canada and South America (obviously his own property, by manifest destiny) should curtly answer his curt diplomatic notes and show no helpfulness about becoming part of his inevitable empire.
Sarason was as eager for war with Mexico (or Ethiopia or Siam or Greenland or any other country that would provide his pet young painters with a chance to portray Sarason being heroic amid curious vegetation) as Haik;
Fascists, like all drunkards, seem to function most vigorously at night.
Haik was working up war with Mexico. (Canada? Japan? Russia? They would come later.)
“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.”
“The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”
“The Republican represents the old school of honesty and integrity. It takes that kind of leadership to defeat fascism.”
“I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.”
