John Steinbeck Quotes

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much – make it greedy, miserable and sick.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do…Try to be better than yourself.

If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.