John Mason Brown famous quotes

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.
-- John Mason Brown

#Communication #Want #Remember

Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.
-- John Mason Brown

#Children #Reason #Destroying

America is a land where men govern, but women rule.
-- John Mason Brown

#Funny #Women #Land

To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.
-- John Mason Brown

#Tattoo #People #Criticism

He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.
-- John Mason Brown

#Kings #Humorous #Play

She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life.
-- John Mason Brown

#Education #Purpose #Daily Life

It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.
-- John Mason Brown

#Writing #Winning #Agony

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.
-- John Mason Brown

#Writing #Vanity #Mirrors

No one is worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause.
-- John Mason Brown

#Home #Heaven #Causes

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.
-- John Mason Brown

#Way

Charm is a glow within a woman which casts a most becoming light on others.
-- John Mason Brown

#Women #Light #Becoming

Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes.
-- John Mason Brown

#Eye #Television #Gum

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.
-- John Mason Brown

#Cities #Circles #People

Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you...It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning...
-- John Mason Brown

#Drama #Past #Men

I have lived long enough to be battered by the realities of life, and not too long to be downed by them.
-- John Mason Brown

#Reality #Long #Enough

Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend, and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth.
-- John Mason Brown

#Believe #People #Legends

Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.
-- John Mason Brown

#Education #Thinking #Sheep

No man, with a man's heart in him gets far on his way without some bitter, soul-searching disappointment. Happy is he who is brave enough to push on to another stage of the journey.
-- John Mason Brown

#Happiness #Disappointment #Heart

The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.
-- John Mason Brown

#Men #Trials #Action

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.
-- John Mason Brown

#Blood #Land #Revolution

Most people spend most of their days doing what they do not want to do in order to earn the right, at times, to do what they may desire.
-- John Mason Brown

#Work #Order #People

So much of TV seems to be chewing gum for the eyes.... TV desperately needs more self-reliance and pride in the medium.
-- John Mason Brown

#Eye #Pride #Self

What happiness is, no person can say for another. But no one, I am convinced, can be happy who lives only for himself. The joy of living comes from immersion in something that we know to be bigger, better, more enduring and worthier than we are.
-- John Mason Brown

#Joy #Bigger #Immersion

I am ready any time. Do not keep me waiting.
-- John Mason Brown

#Time #Waiting #Management

The more one has seen of the good, the more one asks for the better.
-- John Mason Brown

So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.
-- John Mason Brown

#Memories #Today #Tomorrow

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.
-- John Mason Brown

#Passion #Prejudice #Documentation

What a man is is the basis owhat he dreams and thinks, accepts and rejects, feels and perceives.
-- John Mason Brown

#Dream #Thinking #Men

Friendship should be a private pleasure, not a public boast. I loathe those braggarts who are forever trying to invest themselves with importance by calling important people by their first names in or out of print. Such first-naming for effect makes me cringe.
-- John Mason Brown

#Friendship #Names #People

God spare me sclerosis of the curiosity, for the curiosity which craves to keep us informed about the small things no less than the large is the mainspring, the dynamo, the jet propulsion of all complete living.
-- John Mason Brown

#Curiosity #Propulsion #Jet