When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anyw...here else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a P...resent nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civili...zed, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, i...s at the same time its ruling intellectual force. No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot... Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,... Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In all history no class has been enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we could prove to Republicans or D...emocrats that every woman would vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Montesquieu well knew, and justly admired, the happy constitution of this country [Great Britain], where fixed and known laws equa...lly restrain monarchy from tyranny and liberty from licentiousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »