“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
Source: Revolutionary Road
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Richard Yates 24
Novelist, short story writer 1926–1992Related quotes
“Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money.”
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
Quoted in Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women by Bill Adler p. 36
As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads"
1910s
Context: Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.
As quoted in "Dolly Parton: Gee, She’s So Nice" https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/dolly-parton-gee-shes-really-nice (7 December 1980), by Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert
1980s
Remark to scientist Herman Francis Mark
1940s, Only Then Shall We Find Courage (1946)
