E. B. White

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

E. B. White

"Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor."

E. B. White

"I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure."

E. B. White

"Did it ever occur to you that there's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another?"

E. B. White

"Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams — Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword."

E. B. White

"Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma."

E. B. White

"There is a decivilizing bug somewhere at work; unconsciously persons of stern worth, by not resenting and resisting the small indignities of the times, are preparing themselves for the eventual acceptance of what they themselves know they don’t want."

E. B. White

"Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And everybody is always somewhere else."

E. B. White

"All poets who, when reading from their own works, experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not."

E. B. White

"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

E. B. White

"Government is the thing. Law is the thing. Not brotherhood, not international cooperation, not security councils that can stop war only by waging it... Where does security lie, anyway — security against the thief, a bad man, the murderer? In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in government."

E. B. White

"I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic."

E. B. White

"Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going."

E. B. White

"I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles."

E. B. White

"No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

E. B. White

"Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying."

E. B. White

"When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed."

E. B. White

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

E. B. White

"We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist."

E. B. White

"An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write."

E. B. White

"One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy."

E. B. White

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

E. B. White

"Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."

E. B. White

"An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life."

E. B. White

"As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the one thing left to us in a bad time."

E. B. White