As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, b...ourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvelous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man w...ho had ever been in politics in this country, could--his admirers said--have brought together so many hostile interests and made so fantastic a combination. Some men went so far as to maintain that he would "rope in the President himself before the old man had time to swap knives with him." The beauty of his work consisted in the skill with which he evaded questions of principle. As he wisely said, the issue now involved was not one of principle but of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly democr...atic; for democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She atoned for want of devotion to God, by devotion to man. She had a woman's natural tendency towards asceticism, self-extinction..., self-abnegation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was this practical sense and cool will that won over Mrs. Lee, who was woman enough to assume that all the graces were well eno...ugh employed in decorating her, and it was enough if the other sex felt her superiority. Men were valuable only in proportion to their strength and their appreciation of women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all things in life, Mrs. Lee held this kind of court-service in contempt, for she was something more than republican--a little ...communistic at heart, and her only serious complaint of the President and his wife was that they undertook to have a court and to ape monarchy. She had no notion of admitting social superiority in any one, President or Prince, and to be suddenly converted into a lady-in-waiting to a small German Grand-Duchess, was a terrible blow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The preacher then went on to criticise the attitude of religion towards science. "If there is still a feeling of hostility between... them ... it is no longer the fault of religion. There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is so no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea,--that idea which the church has never ceased to embody,--I AM!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Poor Esther!" said he gloomily. "She has been brought up among men, and is not used to harness. If things go wrong she will rebel..., and a woman who rebels is lost."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »