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Advertising
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Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams -- Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Age
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In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Agreement
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There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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America
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A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable -- or at least deserving of support.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Anger
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I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Architecture
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Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Authors & Writing
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Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Automobiles
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Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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City Life, Cities
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Commuter -- one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Communication
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The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Computers
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I'm not against machines, as are some people who feel that the computer is leading us back into the jungle...I'm against machines only when the convenience they afford to some people is regarded as more important than the inconvenience they cause to all.
In short, I don't think computers should wear the pants or make the decisions. They are deficient in humor, they are not intuitive, and they are not aware of the imponderables. The men who feed them seem to believe that everything is made out of ponderables, which isn't the case. I read a poem once that a computer had written, but didn't care much for it. It seemed to me I could write a better one myself, if I were to put my mind to it.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, Dear Mr. ___, "The New Yorker", 1967
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Conservation
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I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, Essays of E.B. White, 1977
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Democracy
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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, New Yorker, July 3, 1944
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Design
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The complaint about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernize, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Farming
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A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Friends
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You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, Charlotte, in
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Generations
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A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood -- a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Grammar
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Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Humor
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Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, Some Remarks on Humor (introduction)
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Immortality
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Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Language
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The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Liberalism
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The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Nudity
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A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist--nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Books by and about E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White