Ben Hecht famous quotes

In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
-- Ben Hecht

#Lying #Desire #Deceit

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
-- Ben Hecht

#Love #Valentines Day #Men

Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.
-- Ben Hecht

#Political #World #Bartender

A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.
-- Ben Hecht

#Fake People #Men #Thinking

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
-- Ben Hecht

#Time #Business #Reading

The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.
-- Ben Hecht

#Art #World #Mass

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
-- Ben Hecht

#Sports #Brain #Hollywood

Love is a hole in the heart.
-- Ben Hecht

#Love #Heart #Holes

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
-- Ben Hecht

#Time #Humorous #Moving

I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.
-- Ben Hecht

#Mad #Secret #World

H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.
-- Ben Hecht

#Christian #Art #War

A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief.” If he is wise he has not been impoverished. Nor has the fool been enriched. The thief flatters us by stealing. We flatter him by complaining.
-- Ben Hecht

#Wise #Men #Yelling

There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
-- Ben Hecht

#Silence #Old Friends #Stormy

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent. The rest of the fraternity is deadwood. Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
-- Ben Hecht

#Men #Differences #Toes

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
-- Ben Hecht

#Criticism #Benefits #Too Much

I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.
-- Ben Hecht

#Men #Envy #Guilt

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
-- Ben Hecht

#Art #Fall #Writing

In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.
-- Ben Hecht

#Art #Adventure #Mind

When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.
-- Ben Hecht

#Money #Blessing #People

That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
-- Ben Hecht

#Atheism #Proof #Existence

He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
-- Ben Hecht

#Summer #Love Life #Ants

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
-- Ben Hecht

#Safety #Justice #Mind

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...
-- Ben Hecht

#Dream #Book #Land

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
-- Ben Hecht

#Valentines Day #Dream #Agony

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.
-- Ben Hecht

#Hair #Television #Lasts

The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
-- Ben Hecht

#Writing #People #Mind

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
-- Ben Hecht

#Yellowstone #Offering #Chicago

For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
-- Ben Hecht

#Years #Games #Effort

People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
-- Ben Hecht

#Sex #People #Political

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
-- Ben Hecht

#Honor #Dubious #Hollywood

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.
-- Ben Hecht

#Dark #Mind #Age

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
-- Ben Hecht

#Men #Stupidest #Connected

The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
-- Ben Hecht

#People #Mind #Eruption

Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.
-- Ben Hecht

#Party #Greatness #Glowing

In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
-- Ben Hecht

#Names #Hollywood #Thirty