Children are extraordinarily precious members of society; they are exquisitely alert, sensitive, and conscious of their surroundin...gs; and they are extraordinarily vulnerable to maltreatment or emotional abuse by adults who refuse to give them the profound respect and affection to which they are unconditionally entitled.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exa...ct than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional sta...te, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon--the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ordinary people think that talent must be always on its own level and that it arises every morning like the sun, rested and refres...hed, ready to draw from the same storehouse--always open, always full, always abundant--new treasures that it will heap up on those of the day before; such people are unaware that, as in the case of all mortal things, talent has its increase and decrease, and that independently of the career it takes, like everything that breathes ... it undergoes all the accidents of health, of sickness, and of the dispositions of the soul--its gaiety or its sadness.... As with our perishable flesh ... talent is obliged constantly to keep guard over itself, to combat, and to keep perpetually on the alert amid the obstacles that witness the exercise of its singular power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was dru...dgery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These words are dedicated to those who survived because life is a wilderness and they were savage... because life is an awakening and they were alert because life is a flowering and they blossomed because life is a struggle and they struggled because life is a gift and they were free to accept itLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good guilt is a product of love and responsibility. It is a natural, positive instinct that parents and good child care providers ...have. If bad guilt is a monster, good guilt is a friendly fairy godmother, yakking away in your head to keep you alert to the needs of your baby.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but... increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we get on television is not a headline service but a tabloid service. It takes that old format to its logical extreme, since ...manifestly television is all pictures, for which anchormen and reporters merely provide captions. Some stories, alas, cannot be illustrated. Usually they are the complicated and boring ones--about the economy or foreign policy, let us say. The inherent demand of the medium is to get through this stuff as quickly and painlessly as possible, cut from the talking heads to the crying heads (disaster victims, let us say, or political loonies), or better still, running feet or rapidly moving vehicles--explosions, riots. Like the tabloid journalists before them, the television crew is always on the alert for an emblematic figure and will thrust a moment of fame on anyone who is eyewitness to a disaster.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »