“This is one of the greatest menaces there is; people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grimly gray and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It’s a form of egotism, a supreme form. I’ve toyed with it myself and understand it a little. It’s as dangerous as toying with a drug. How can these bastards hope to get hold of what’s the matter with the world and do anything about it when they haven’t the slightest idea that something just as bad and unnatural has happened to them?”
James Thurber, letter to E.B. White, January 20, 1938 (courtesy of Thomas Vinciguerra)