Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.... In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I asked myself, "Is it going to prevent me from getting out of here? Is there a risk of death attached to it? Is it permanently di...sabling? Is it permanently disfiguring? Lastly, is it excruciating?" If it doesn't fit one of those five categories, then it isn't important.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some of us were ambivalent, but we don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right.... Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The presence of the blacks is the greatest evil that threatens the United States. They increase, in the Gulf States, faster than d...o the whites. They cannot be kept for ever in slavery, since the tendencies of the modern world run strongly the other way. They cannot be absorbed into the white population, for the whites will not intermarry with them, not even in the North where they have been free for two generations. Once freed, they would be more dangerous than now, because they would not long submit to be debarred from political rights. A terrible struggle would ensue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich ...and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor. As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully-restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who ... have already accep...ted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight ...that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we d...o want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the g...ulf, in the darting to an aim.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »