Quotes by Max Eastman

• I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.
• The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
• Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.
• People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.
• Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.
• A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.
• A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
• Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.
• Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.
• Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.
• Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.
• A smile is the universal welcome.
• The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.
• A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.
• It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.