Quotes by Russell Lynes

• It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.
• When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.
• The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.
• Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.
• A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.
• In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.
• If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.
• Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
• Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.
• Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.
• A truly appreciative child will break, lose, spoil, or fondle to death any really successful gift within a matter of minutes.
• The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.