(1) Heywood Broun, Pieces of Hate, and Other Enthusiasms (1922)
The tragedy of life is not that man losses but that he almost wins.
(2) Heywood Broun, New York World (26th January, 1923)
We must bring ourselves to realize that it is necessary to support free speech for the things we hate in order to ensure it for the things in which we believe with all our heart.
(3) Heywood Broun, Sitting on the World (1924)
Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.
(4) Heywood Broun, New York World (26th August, 1926)
In a certain sense every creative person is a reformer, but this does not mean that he must be in his work a propagandist for good roads, shorter hours, and a low tariff. All these are excellent things, but they need not be the concern of the artist.
(5) Heywood Broun, New York World (23rd October, 1926)
Free speech is about as good as cause as the world has ever known. But, like the poor, it is always with us and gets shoved aside in favour of things which seem at some given moment more vital.
(6) Heywood Broun, New York World (18th April, 1927)
The case against the men (Sacco and Vanzetti) is one of the flimsiest on which conviction was ever obtained. That they are wholly innocent of wrongdoing seems much the likeliest contingency. Obviously the wholly extraneous issue of radicalism and opposition to the war entered into the deliberation of the jury.
(7) Heywood Broun, New York World (5th August, 1927)
When at last Judge Thayer in a tiny voice passed sentence upon Sacco and Vanzetti, a woman in the courtroom said with terror: "It is death condemning life!"
The men in Charlestown Prison are shining spirits, and Vanzetti has spoken with an eloquence not known elsewhere within our time. They are too bright, we shield our eyes and kill them. We are the dead, and in us there is not feeling nor imagination nor the terrible torment of lust for justice. And in the city where we sleep, smug gardeners walk to keep the grass above our little houses sleek and cut whatever blade thrusts up a head above its fellows.
"The decision is unbelievably brutal," said the Chairman of the Defense Committee, and he was wrong. The thing is worthy to be believed. It has happened. It will happen again, and the shame is wider than that which must rest upon Massachusetts. I have never believed that the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti was one set apart from many by reason of the passion and prejudice which encrusted all the benches. Scratch through the varnish of any judgment seat and what
will you strike but hate thick-clotted from centuries of angry verdicts? Did any man ever find power within his hand except to use it as a whip?
Governor Alvan T. Fuller never had any intention in all his investigation but to put a new and higher polish upon the proceedings. The justice of the business was not his concern. He hoped to make it respectable. He called old men from high places to stand behind his chair so that he might seem to speak with all the authority of a high priest or a Pilate.
(8) Heywood Broun, New York World (13th May, 1927)
The man who says, "I will not fight at all, no matter what the issue may seem to be," may run the risk of missing one or two righteous crusades, but he's almost sure to escape an even greater number of bloody and useless shambles. The reasoning makes me pacifist.
(9) In April, 1933, Heywood Broun was expelled from the Socialist Party for sharing the lecture platform with members of the Communist Party during a rally demanding the release of Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Nine. He wrote about the event in the New York World-Telegram (29th April, 1933)
I don't expect the Communists to love me, and I'm not going to love them. I hope from time to time to say many things about them, and I expect the same in return. But I think it would be a fine idea not to fight until Tom Mooney is free and the Scottsboro boys are acquitted.
(10) Heywood Broun, New York World-Telegram (9th December, 1939)
At 51 I'm a better fighter than at 21. Brotherhood is not just a Bible world. Out of comradeship can come and will come the happy life for all. The underdog can and will lick his weight in the wildcats of the world.
(12) William Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide (1971)
Heywood Broun, who was later to organize the Newspaper Guild, was at that time very friendly with Paul. He declared himself a socialist and tried to convince Paul that the Socialist Party position was the one he should follow. I myself was not then identified with any political party, but I had begun a study of the Soviet Union. My studies naturally led me into the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and I found it harder and harder to argue against its principal tenets. It seemed to me to have the support of historical and objective truth - a truth that corresponded with the needs of the great majority of the world's people and especially Black people.
