Otto Friedrich

“The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense was somewhere down around number seventy-nine.”

“To be great, one does not have to be mad, but it certainly helps.”

“We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”

“History is a novel for which the people is the author.”

“There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.”

“They say that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but I don't believe it. I believe it is the first.”

“The basic rule of journalism is to tell the truth.”

“By the time a man is 30, he knows that the world is a full-blown literary classic, and that he has been cast as a minor character.”

“It takes a long time to become young.”