Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Co...ngress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Miss Dudley ... gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid- ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is d...oing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second-rate amateur and will never be any thing more, though she has done one or two things which I give you my word I would like to have done myself. She picks up all she knows without an effort and knows nothing well, yet she seems to understand whatever is said. Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity. I notice that the lines of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all end with a slight upward curve like a yacht's sails, which gives a kind of hopefulness and self-confidence to her expression. Mind and face have the same curves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professio...nal readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I- Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left... in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who are our true rulers? The Negro poets, to be sure. Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of t...hem, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended (that is, almost spoilt), printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps with the world. Meanwhile, the poor author digs away with his hoe, utterly ignorant of his greatness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but... he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why should all the major religions of the modern world include a crucial encounter with wilderness--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed in ...the desert mountains, Siddhartha in the jungle? And why should the predominant modern view of the origin and development of life have arisen from the five-year wilderness voyage of a Victorian amateur naturalist named Charles Darwin? There evidently is more to wilderness than meets the eye--more than water, timber, minerals, the materials of physical civilized existence.... Placing Darwin in the tradition of Moses and Jesus may seem heresy from both the Judeo-Christian and scientific viewpoints, but I think the roles played by the three figures have been similar. They wrenched their respective cultures out of a complacency that amounted to self-worship and thrust them in new directions that (if not always entirely beneficial) enlarged the human perspective. Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all life. I doubt whether any of the three would have been able to influence his society if he had not been fortified by a season in the wilderness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired ...of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word "culture" used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the ... radio station played a Chopin polonaise. On all the following days news bulletins were prefaced by Chopin--preludes, e...tudes, waltzes, mazurkas. The war became for me a victory, known in advance, Chopin over Hitler.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »