7 Quotes & Sayings By Howard Fast

Howard Fast was born in New York City, February 21, 1908. His father was a lawyer and his mother a concert pianist. He grew up in Manhattan, in the East Side ghetto where he attended P.S. 63 and then graduated from Hunter College High School in 1926 Read more

He published his first story when he was 16 years old. The manuscript "A Nice Place to Visit" appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. The same year he graduated from high school, Fast married Jeanette Guttman, an elementary school teacher four years his senior.

They had no children who survived infancy. After college Fast worked as a reporter for various newspapers and as a copy editor for magazines including Collier's, Esquire, Liberty Magazine, The American Weekly, The Book of the Month Club, The Magazine of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly and Poetry Review. Fast was an active member of the Communist Party USA during World War II and served on the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA from 1946 to 1950.

During this time he was also the editor of The New Masses magazine which published many of his works. In 1953 Fast became the first American to be awarded the Stalin Peace Prize for his writings on Russia during World War II.

1
I am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered] Howard Fast
2
Computers: he always fixed on computers when his mind wandered into the future--instruments he revered and hated. The computer world was a place where snotty kids knew everything and nothing.... The computer was part of a future cloudy, unpredictable and menacing. Howard Fast
3
A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill. Howard Fast
4
The revolution goes on; a man does not make the revolution, not a thousand men, not an army and not a party; the revolution comes from the people as they reach toward God, and a little of God is in each person and each will not forget it. This it is the revolution when slaves shake their chains and the revolution when a strong man bends toward a weaker and says, "Here, comrade, is my arm." The revolution goes on and nothing stops it; but because the people are seeking what is good, not what is wicked or powerful or cruel or rich or venal, but simply what is good--because of that the people flounder and feel along one dark road after another. The people no more all-seeing than their rulers once were; it is in intention that they differ. Howard Fast
5
In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy. Howard Fast
6
A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion. Howard Fast