In certain savage tribes in ...

In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don\'t fall out they let them live another year.
In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don't fall out they let them live another year.
 John Dos Passos

More phrases

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
 William Tecumseh Sherman
The same mentality that leads to environmental despoliation, environmental destruction, also leads to damage to people.
 Naomi Oreskes
You can't break poor people mentality. Once you grow up poor, you don't take anything for granted. It can have the negative side also because you can never truly be relaxed.
 Will Smith
The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.
 William Howard Taft
I think society had to grow up to the mentality of Peter Norman.
 John Carlos

Quotes from the same author

It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.
 John Dos Passos
To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.
 John Dos Passos
The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.
 John Dos Passos
Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
 John Dos Passos
That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.
 John Dos Passos