The Wild Flag Quotes

“Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in Don’t Shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”
― E. B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Some day people will put faith in poets, who saw things centuries ago in perfect clarity.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“One nation's common sense is another nation's high blood pressure.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“It is already apparent that the word 'Fascist' will be one of the hardest-worked words in the Presidential campaign. Henry Wallace called some people Fascists the other day in a speech and next day up jumped Harrison Spangler, the Republican, to remark that if there were any Fascists in this country you would find them in the New Deal's palace guard. It is getting so a Fascist is a man who votes the other way. Persons who vote your way, of course, continue to be 'right-minded people.'

We are sorry to see this misuse of the word 'Fascist.' If we recall matters, a Fascist is a member of the Fascist party or a believer in Fascist ideals. These are: a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus some miscellaneous gymnastics for the young and a general feeling of elation. It seems to us that there are many New Deal Democrats who do not subscribe to such a program, also many aspiring Republicans. Other millions of Americans are nonsubscribers. It's too bad to emasculate the word 'Fascist' by using it on persons whose only offense is that they vote the wrong ticket. The word should be saved for use in cases where it applies, as it does to members of our Ku Klux Klan, for instance, whose beliefs and practices are identical with Fascism.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there is a certain quality in Fascism which is quite close to a certain quality in nationalism. Fascism is openly against people-in-general, in favor of people-in-particular. Nationalism, although in theory not dedicated to such an idea, actually works against people-in-general because of its preoccupation with people-in-particular. It reminds one of Fascism, also, in its determination to stabilize its own position by whatever haphazard means present themselves--by treaties, policies, balances, agreements, pacts, and the jockeying for position which is summed up in the term 'diplomacy.' This doesn't make an America Firster a Fascist. It simply makes him, in our opinion, a man who hasn't grown into his pants yet. The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet. Once you see it, you never forget it.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“People are shopping these days. The stores are crowded. Buyers are intent but not gay. The news of the atomic bomb came as a terrible shock to everybody, and the easiest way to take your mind off it is to buy things.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Many excellent sites have been proposed as headquarters for the United Nations, but the location we like best is the Black Hills of South Dakota. Staunch advocacy of this site appears from time to time in the appendix of the Congressional Record, and we have been following it, first with interest, lately with enthusiasm. Unquestionably, the seat of the new world league should be Dinosaur Park, near Rapid City, South Dakota, in the Black Hills, for in Dinosaur Park stand the cement figures, full size, of the Big Five of Long Ago--Tyrannosaurus rex (35 feet long, 16 feet high), Triceratops (27 by 11), Brontosaurus (90 feet long, weight 40 tons), and a couple of other plug-uglies of the period, all of them in combative attitudes astride a well-worn path. Much can be said for such a bizarre setting. Here let the new halls be built, so that earnest statesmen, glancing up from their secret instructions from the home office, may gaze out upon the prehistoric sovereigns who kept on fighting one another until they perished from the earth.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Peace was what people were groping for, and when Americans grope for something they turn naturally to display advertising and grope all over the place.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time, they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed. Today is not so much the fact of the end of a war which engages us. It is the limitless power of the victor. The quest for a substitute for God ended suddenly. The substitute turned up. And who do you suppose it was? It was man himself, stealing God's stuff.

We have often complained that the political plans for the new world, as shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic enough. We repeat the complaint. The only conceivable way to catch up with atomic energy is with political energy directed to a universal structure.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The latest element to turn up is called plutonium--which is Disney with a touch of mineral water. The word uranium had a mighty sound, a solemn sound, an awful sound. Plutonium is a belly laugh. Plutonium, incidentally, is not known in the stars; the stars are too high-minded. Plutonium is a mouthwash used by Mandrake. Plutonium is just something belonging to the comical race of people who started their first atomic fire under a football stadium.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“It will be found, eventually, that just as impurities in water become radioactive from transmuted uranium, impurities in thought become radioactive from transmuted facts and figures lurking in the pitchblende of the mind. We have long suspected that impurities in thought become radioactive. It is a major problem. Fascism, one of the commonest impurities in human thought, is unquestionably radioactive.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Human rights take shape and meaning when they are associated with representative government involving responsibility and duty. So far, the peace proposals do not include popular representation in the council and the assembly, and the people therefore assume no personal responsibility for anything and will therefore gain no personal rights. Commissions (stop us if we are wrong about this) cannot create human rights.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Man is unpredictable, despite Mr. Wells' good record. On Monday, man may be hysterical with doom, and on Tuesday you will find him opening the Doomday Bar & Grill and settling down for another thousand years of terrifying queerness.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“We walked home in the cold afternoon past Franklin Simon's windows, where the children of all nations revolved steadily in the light. Most of the stores were concentrating on the gift aspect of the Nativity, displaying frankincense, myrrh, and bath salts, but Franklin Simon advertised the Child Himself, along with a processional of other children of assorted races, lovely to behold. We stood and watched passers-by take in this international and interracial scene, done in terms of childhood, and we observed the gleam in the eyes of colored people as they spotted the little colored child in with the others.

There hasn't been a Christmas like this one since the first Christmas--the fear, the suffering, the awe, the strange new light that nobody understands yet. All the traditional characteristics of Christmas are this year in reverse: instead of the warm grate and the happy child, in most parts of the world the cold room and the starveling. The soldiers of the triumphant armies return to their homes to find a hearty welcome but an unfamiliar air of uneasiness, uncertainty, and constraint. They find, too, that people are groping toward something which still has no name but which keeps turning up--in department-store windows and in every other sort of wistful human display. It is the theme concealed in the victory which the armies of the democracies won in the field, the yet unclaimed triumph: justice among men of all races, a world in which children (of whatever country) are warm and unafraid.

It seems too bad that men are preparing to blow the earth to pieces just as they have got their hands on a really first-rate idea. Our Christmas greetings this year are directed to the men and women who will represent the people of the world at the meeting of the United Nations Organization in January. We send them best wishes and a remembrance of that first Christmas. Our hope is that they will shed the old robes which have adorned dignitaries for centuries and put on the new cloth that fits one man as well as another, no matter where he lives on this worried and all too shatterable earth.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Think not to represent us by safeguarding our interests. Represent us by perceiving that our interests are other people's, and theirs ours.

When you think with longing of the place where you were born, remember that the sun leaves it daily to go somewhere else.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“In the name of all that is peaceable, should a totalitarian country be inside or outside a security league? Nobody knew then. Nobody knows now.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Peace is expensive, and so are human rights and civil liberties; they have a price, and we the peoples have not yet offered to pay it. Instead we are trying to furnish our globe with these precious ornaments the cheap way, holding our sovereignty cautiously in one fist while extending the other hand in a gesture of co-operation. In the long run this will prove the hard way, the violent way.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The presence of Fascism anywhere constitutes a threat to peace, and you do not need to debate it.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The only condition more appalling, less practical, than world government is the lack of it in this atomic age. Most of the scientists who produced the bomb admit that. Nationalism and the split atom cannot coexist in the planet.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Where do human rights arise, anyway? In the sun, in the moon, in the daily paper, in the conscientious heart? They arise in responsible government. Where does security lie, anyway--security against the thief, the murderer, the footpad? In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in government. Where does control lie--control of smoking in the theater, of nuclear energy in the planet? Control lies in government, because government is people.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature. Here dwell the world's emigrants under one law, and the law is: Thou shalt not push thy neighbor around. By some curious divinity which in him lies, Man, in this experiment of mixed races and mixed creeds, has turned out more good than bad, more right than wrong, more kind than cruel, and more sinned against than sinning. This is the world's hope and its chance.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The pattern of life is plain enough. The world shrinks. It will eventually be unified.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Peace is not something to be kept, like a pet monkey; peace is the by-product of responsible government.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The name of the new peace organization is to be the United Nations. It is a misnomer and will mislead the people. The name of the organization should be the League of Free and Independent Nations pledged to Enforce Peace, or the Fifty Sovereign Nations of the World Solemnly Sworn to Prevent Each Other from Committing Aggression. These titles are clumsy, candid, and damning. They are exact, however. The phrase 'United Nations' is inexact, because it implies union, and there is no union suggested or contemplated in the work of Dumbarton Oaks. The nations of the world league will be united only as fifty marbles in a dish are united. Put your toe on the dish and the marbles will scatter, each to its own corner.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Lord Cranborne pointed out last week that when the Allies meet to reconstruct the Atlantic Charter, the fixing would be done by the powers. Small nations, he said, would not be included in the talks because to include them would be to 'cause confusion.' Seems very probable it would. Complications are bound to arise when you consult all the interested parties in any affair. Nevertheless, we strongly recommend this sort of confusion.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Whatever name you want to pin on Germany's trouble, it is contagious, it is human, and there is a lot of it around. Doctor Brickner has managed to give the impression that the problem of the peace is a problem of turning Germans into nice people. This is misleading and gives many persons the same sort of holier-than-thou feeling which Nazism celebrates. The question today is not whether German is incurably paranoid but whether her enemies are incurably nationalistic. The answer to this question is yet to be made and we advise our readers to keep their eye on the ball.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The question is not whether the paranoid Germany is incurable but whether we are. All Germany did was start a war; we and our Allies have to finish one and then construct a world out of broken promises and old bottle caps.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“One of the curious difficulties in the way of world federation is the necessity of developing a planetary loyalty as a substitute for, or a complement to, national loyalty. In the United Nations of the World there will be no foreigner to make fun of, no outsider to feel better than. A citizen of the U.N.W. must take pride in the whole world; that, for some people, is going to be a very large thing to get excited about.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“The history of the modern world is the story of nations having affairs with each other. These affairs have been based on caprice and on ambition; they have been oiled with diplomacy and intrigue and have been unsanctified by law, there having been no law covering the rights and obligations of the contracting parties. The result has been chaotic and there still is no law.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“A world made one, by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would deprive him of the enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn't know and despising what he has never seen. This would be a severe deprivation, perhaps an intolerable one. The awful truth is, a world government would lack an enemy, and that is a deficiency not to be lightly dismissed. It will take a yet undiscovered vitamin to supply the blood of man with a substitute for national ambition and racial antipathy; but we are discovering new vitamins all the time, and I am aware of that too.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“A world government, were we ever to get one, would impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom--although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters