Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth ma...rking, in the lifetimes of many generations; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchairs of an afternoon--the most favored alternative method.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune; an expectation which the child, if j...ustice is done him, will nobly disappoint. By working on the theory that this resemblance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat his proper promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre. I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another man you. One's enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most significant change wrought by adolescence is the taming of the ideals by which a person measures himself. . . . Love of o...neself becomes love of the species. Conscience is pointed to the future, whispering permission to reach beyond the safety net of our ordinary and finite human existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unu...sual.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Americanistic pitch, of course, was old hat on the Bible circuit, as were subterranean virility fears common, the latter alway...s animating the former in the extra-defensive and recurrent dream of the evangelist in which he sees himself, in full color and cinemascope, a lantern-jawed begrenaded U.S. Marine leaping out of a trench to beat the living shit out of the Devil who, widespread was the assumption, wore perfume, spoke Russian, and carried a purse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Determination and skill come out of a depth of political and cultural experiences. Women resist and are brave in the most ordinary...-seeming situations: on a welfare line, after being told that medical benefits are going to cut; on a street late at night helping a sister who is being harassed; as a mother demanding that the hospital stop experimenting with sterilization on her daughters; one sister to another trying to convince her to stop shooting up because it's giving the man a victory, swallowing up her life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace a...t Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-d...atum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon, an...d superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Red Cross in its nature, it aims and purposes, and consequently, its methods, is unlike any other organization in the country.... It is an organization of physical action, of instantaneous action, at the spur of the moment; it cannot await the ordinary deliberation of organized bodies if it would be of use to suffering humanity, ... [ellipsis in original] it has by its nature a field of its own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »