For three hundred years the idea that nurture is the determining factor in human actions has been used to argue for a variety of s...ocial programs--if we can only change people's environments, the argument goes, we can make a better humanity; reduce crime, fight poverty, get rid of the sex difference in math. This creed is usually associated with the politics of the Left. On the other hand, if nature is responsible for much of what we are--heavily influencing such things as intelligence, personality traits, perhaps even propensity to commit crimes--then there are limits to what social programs can do to reduce the individual differences between people. This conviction is often thought to fit better with the politics of the Right.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a very important and fundamental relation between learning and personality development. . . . The two interact in a "circ...ular process." Thus, mastery of symbol systems (letters, words, numbers), reasoning, judging, problem-solving, acquiring and organizing information and all such intellectual functions are fed by and feed into varied aspects of the personality--feelings about oneself, identity, potential for relatedness, autonomy, creativity, and integration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the fac...e of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lieutenant Hirth: The Eskimos are racially as low as Negroes. The Factor: What's the matter with Negroes?... Lieutenant Hirth: They're semi-apes. Only one degree above the Jews.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and ...dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O but we talked at large before The sixteen men were shot,... But who can talk of give and take, What should be and what not While those dead men are loitering there To stir the boiling pot?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include "Capital Lawes" providing a death penalty for any c...hild over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made... any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »