If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it. – S.I. Hayakawa
Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, “I have failed three times,” and what happens when he says, “I am a failure.” – S.I. Hayakawa
Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries. – S.I. Hayakawa
Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting. – S.I. Hayakawa
Catalogues of imaginary libraries are an obscure but fruitful area of collecting. The tradition of imaginary books, which exist only within other books, goes back at least to Rabelais, who invented a list of book titles for the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Gargantua and Pantagruel (c.1532). – Emi Hastings, “Catalogues of Imaginary Libraries,” 2014