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Opinion
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The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new attempt, differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, The Essays of E.B. White
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Parties
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It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Planning
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I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Poetry
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A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Politics
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A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people's minds would be uninhabitable.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Principles
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Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Television
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The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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War
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The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it -- the speed of his acceptance.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Weather
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All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Youth
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There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Books by and about E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White