If I should ever decide in the future to discuss my deep Christian beliefs and condemnation and sinfulness, I would use another fo...rum besides Playboy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unfortunately, nearly all the "sights" in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers' homes in ...the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy's, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of "Didn't he make a holy spectacle of himself?" An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress--these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and ...a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a tra...nsient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less kno...wn Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak only... of the mess.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is... all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »