Top 25 Quotes & Sayings by Gerald Stanley Lee

To be original is to discover the commonplace of a thousand years--to face at first the sneer that no one would have thought of it, and at last the indifference because any one would.

Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.

There are two kinds of second class men in business. There is the man who puts money first and service second. There is the man who puts service first and money second, who never has any money. The first class man in business is the man who is made up out of rolling the other two kinds into one man and working them together.

What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.

Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.

The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.

We may have hell if we have war, and we may have hell if we have peace. But if we have no vision for what we do, we have hell anyway.

The new industrial world is coming to us one new free-born industry at a time.

When America has been discovered in America it will be discovered in Europe. They are looking for America now.

It is never the machines that are dead. It is only the mechanically-minded men that are dead.

We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's visions. Towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.

Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured today by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for -- the centre of mass.

New York is the capital, the national headquarters of homelessness.... No one feels he belongs here.

The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists in wanting it still harder.

A vice is a failure of desire

I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.

Machinery makes men like itself.

The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world had been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds.

America is a tune. It must be sung together.

Crowds speak in heroes.

Christmas it too large to be tucked away in the toe of a child's stocking.

There is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal for a hero. He never has time to sit on it. One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from under him, and using it to batter a world with.

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

The idea ... that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked. We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a whole.