All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and... done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, yes, I'd do it all again; the spirit is willing yet; I feel the same desire to do the work but the flesh is weak. It's too bad... that our bodies wear out while our interests are just as strong as ever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the people over here are coming to realize what would happen if Germany and Italy won a European war. We would be out of t...he picture entirely.... If I were a German conqueror what would I do? Obviously I would have the British navy out of the way and the French army out of the way.... The first thing I would do is look around and say, "What outside territories do I want to take for myself?"... We are not quite ready to take on the United States but we can do it by indirection very nicely. We are going to dominate South America ... without violating the Monroe Doctrine. [FDR set forth a scenario of economic domination of Latin America by giving Argentina a choice of agreeing to German domination of its army by economic blackmail by virtue of the fact that Germany controlled all the agricultural markets in Europe on which Argentina depended for livelihood and the same for Brazil.] It is a perfectly open and shut thing and, if you have the complete, physical power to do it, you win.... [F]rom Hitler's point of view, it is rational. And, if any of us were in his place, with his methods, we would do it. I made myself a hump-back, dyed my skin in several places with great spots of yellow; so that, when I look'd in the glass, I was almost frighten'd at my own figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied..., and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no question but that you and I think alike in the great objectives of the peace when it comes. The real problem lies in t...he methods to be used to attain peace without hate.... [I]t is my thought that time is an essential in disseminating the ideals of peace among the very diverse nationalities and national egos of a vast number of separate peoples who, for one reason or another over a thousand years, have divided themselves into a hundred different forms of hate.... Therefore, I have been visualizing a superimposed--or if you like it, a superassumed--obligation by Russia, China, Britain and ourselves that we will act as sheriffs for the maintenance of order during the transition period.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced ...in order to die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an em...pty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is as good a time as any to comment on what I think has grown into an abuse. Congress makes holidays and every time there is ...a holiday it is the practice for one department to telephone over to another department and say we are going to have an extra holiday in this department and what is your department going to do about it.... If it comes on Saturday, they want a holiday on Friday, and of course they couldn't come back and travel on Sunday and so they want another holiday on Monday to get back on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must... somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »