[The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commo...nly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even a...ccepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has always been thought perfectly womanly to be a scrub- woman in the Legislature and to take care of the spittoons; that is en...tirely within the charmed circle of woman's sphere; but for women to occupy any of those official seats would be degrading.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to ...leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy ... is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually re...peat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really ...divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Goddesses never die. They slip in and out of the world's cities, in and out of our dreams, century after century, answering to dif...ferent names, dressed differently, perhaps even disguised, perhaps idle and unemployed, their official altars abandoned, their temples feared or simply forgotten.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The field maneuvers may be different from those in Holmes's day, and the villain is more socially mobile, but since Sir Arthur we ...have not changed the three essential ingredients of the private eye. He must be a bachelor, with the bachelor's harum-scarum availability at all hours (William Powell's marriage to Myrna "Nora" Loy, a wistful concession to the family trade, fooled nobody). He must have an inconspicuous fund of curious knowledge, which in the end is always crucially relevant. He must pity the official guardians of the law. Of course, the twentieth century has grafted some interesting personality changes on the original. Holmes was an eccentric in the Victorian sense, a man with queer hobbies--cocaine was lamentable but pardonably melodramatic--whose social code was essentially that of the ruling classes. He was, in a way, the avenging squire of the underworld ready to administer a horsewhipping to the outcasts who were never privileged by birth to receive it from their fathers. Bogart is a displaced person whose present respectability is uncertain, a classless but well-contained vagabond who is not going to be questioned about where he came from or where he is going. ("I came to Casablanca for the waters." "But there are no waters in Casablanca." "I was misinformed.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We were that generation called "silent," but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official opti...mism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »