A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
John Dos PassosRead
Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that love and life are easily accessible, but the pursuit of money is what requires effort and dedication.
John Dos Passos highlights the irony of modern life where emotional connections such as love and life itself are undervalued and readily available, while money, which is often prioritized, is depicted as scarce and worthy of hard work. This statement reflects a critique of societal values that emphasize material wealth over the intrinsic worth of personal relationships and experiences.
Themes
LoveMoneyLifeWorkValue
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the true sources of happiness.
More from John Dos Passos
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Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
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There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.
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The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs
John Dos PassosRead
U.S.A. is the speech of the people
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