I Believe That When I

As For The Primitive, I Hark Back To It Because We Are Still Very Primitive. How Many Thousands Of Years Of Culture, Think You, Have Rubbed And Polished At Our Raw Edges? One Probably; At The Best, No More Than Two. And That Takes Us Back To Screaming Savagery, When, Gross Of Body And Deed, We Drank Blood From The Skulls Of Our Enemies, And Hailed As Highest Paradise The Orgies And Carnage Of Valhalla.

There Is An Ecstasy That Marks The Summit Of Life, And Beyond Which Life Cannot Rise. And Such Is The Paradox Of Living, This Ecstasy Comes When One Is Most Alive, And It Comes As A Complete Forgetfulness That One Is Alive. This Ecstasy, This Forgetfulness Of Living, Comes To The Artist, Caught Up And Out Of Himself In A Sheet Of Flame; It Comes To The Soldier, War-mad In A Stricken Field And Refusing Quarter; And It Came To Buck, Leading The Pack, Sounding The Old Wolf-cry, Straining After The Food That Was Alive And That Fled Swiftly Before Him Through The Moonlight.

Avoid The Unhappy Ending, The Harsh, The Brutal, The Tragic, The Horrible -- If You Care To See In Print Things You Write. (in This Connection Don't Do As I Do, But Do As I Say.

[speaking To A Group Of Wealthy New Yorkers] A Million Years Ago, The Cave Man, Without Tools, With Small Brain, And With Nothing But The Strength Of His Body, Managed To Feed His Wife And Children, So That Through Him The Race Survived. You On The Other Hand, Armed With All The Modern Means Of Production, Multiplying The Productive Capacity Of The Cave Man A Million Times — You Are Incompetents And Muddlers, You Are Unable To Secure To Millions Even The Paltry Amount Of Bread That Would Sustain Their Physical Life. You Have Mismanaged The World, And It Shall Be Taken From You.

Life Is Not A Matter Of Holding Good Cards, But Sometimes, Playing A Poor Hand Well.