If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On a rock, whose haughty brow, Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,... Robed in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the Poet stood;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How much atonement is enough? The bombing must be allowed as at least part-payment: those of our young people who are concerned ab...out the moral problem posed by the Allied air offensive should at least consider the moral problem that would have been posed if the German civilian population had not suffered at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden,--what a sorry set of round-shouldered, sp...indle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surely it is one of the requisites of a tasteful garb that the expression of effort to please shall be wanting in it; that the mys...teries of the toilet shall not be suggested by it; that the steps to its completion shall be knocked away like the sculptor's ladder from the statue, and the mental force expended upon it be swept away out of sight like the chips on the studio floor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look into the world--how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose straight heart is open to no man's affliction, taking shelter ...behind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have a title to wear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world has always needed human beings who refuse to believe that history is nothing but a dull, monstrous selfrepetition, a sel...fperpetuating, meaningless game, only varied in outer garb, who cannot be converted from their conviction that history signifies progress in morality, that our race is ascending on an invisible ladder from an animal nature towards divinity, from brutal violence to the wisely ordering intellect, and that the ultimate stage of complete understanding is already close at hand, indeed has almost been attained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo- a...nd heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »