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People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise (1920)

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More quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round.

Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

Tender is the Night (1934)

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

The Crack-Up (1936)

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: F. Scott Fitzgerald (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.