People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all aslee...p at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How often should a woman be pregnant? Continually, or hardly ever? Or must there be a certain number of pregnancy anniversaries es...tablished by fashion? What do you, at the age of forty-three, have to say on the subject? Is it a fact that the laws of nature, or of the country, or of propriety, have ordained this time of life for sterility?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in th...e Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit... or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not ... the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In 1600 the specialization of games and pastimes did not extend beyond infancy; after the age of three or four it decreased and di...sappeared. From then on the child played the same games as the adult, either with other children or with adults. . . . Conversely, adults used to play games which today only children play.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is t...he privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then... begin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness... of a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point... of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting--the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »