The family is constantly changing, as each member changes. Some changes we recognize as developments, and the pleasure they bring ...usually makes us more adaptable. Some changes threaten, or disappoint other members, who may try to resist the change, or punish someone for changing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and poli...te, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America--rather, the United States--seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, f...eared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The prig never learns anything unconsciously or instinctively. He learns only what he feels is worth learning; anything else he no...t only scorns but fears, or regards as compromise, contamination, deterioration. Your prig lives in a kind of many-windowed, not to say entirely glassed-in, dwelling, bathed in a prim religious light; but the windows themselves he never opens, for fear that something may blow in from the street. He wants light without air, he prefers purity to humanity, in all too many cases the campus to the cosmos. He is the most complacent of men, where the snob will often be the most worried; and he is not, like the snob, observant, so he is not, like the snob, adaptable. He is rigid equally by temperament and by training--rigid in all big ways, where the snob is only in small. For the snob, at his Proust-like task of studying the great world, there may be only one place to go for neckties; for the prig there is only one way of going to heaven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »