Margaret Ayer Barnes (April 8, 1886, Chicago, Illinois – October 25, 1967, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American playwright, novelist, and short-story writer.
The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.
Curious, isn't it that "talking with the right people" means something so different from "talking with the right person"?
Riches make cowards of us.
The martial spirit is never dead. It sleeps through fortunate generations, but it wakes up very quickly to the toot of a fife. There's that roistering spirit in men which leads them to think a good fight is a lark - until they've been in one. And the impulse to fight for your own incarnation of an ideal.
All wars are crusades, or we're made to feel they are. That's just what's so wicked about them. We're made to feel - not think - and people can't think when they feel.
Resisted temptations become lost opportunities.
It's a great shame that the world was organized with two sexes. It makes for a lot of trouble.
Sentiment, crystallized, grows into sentimentality. It lost all spontaneity, which was the essence of feeling. It was dated--old-fashioned.
There's nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you're talking, that is, with the right person.
Character comes before scholarship.
Character is the best security.
All banks should be under government control. Deposits guaranteed, dividends reduced, officials turned into state servants taking their orders from Washington.
I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in - the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.