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
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
Interpretation
This quote suggests that people inherently need to create a moral framework to make sense of their actions, similar to how spiders instinctively weave webs.
John Dos Passos highlights the necessity of morality in human behavior, implying that individuals cannot thrive in a state of moral uncertainty or chaos. Just as spiders are compelled to build their webs, humans are driven to establish ethical beliefs to guide their actions and interactions, ensuring a stable and coherent existence.
In practice
During a discussion on ethics in a philosophy class.
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.
Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
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.
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.
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.
U.S.A. is the speech of the people
Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!
Trade is the best cure for prejudice.
Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
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