When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and ...everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I change, and so do women too; But I reflect--which women seldom do.... Tobacco is a filthy weed, That from the devil doth proceed; That drains your purse, that burns your clothes, That makes a chimney of your nose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[On Harvard President Charles William Eliot's lamentation that the average Harvard graduate had fewer than two children:] That is ...quite enough. Harvard graduates do not always make the best fathers. Why should we be agitated over the too small families of the rich when there are so many children of the poor that are not cared for? The rich should make it their duty to raise up these children to a higher standard.... Men of the world hate to give up their tobacco, liquor, sports, clubs, their luxurious habits, their freedom from responsibility. They prefer to flock together and so women are compelled to do the same. President Eliot talks as though the young women were sitting around anxiously and aimlessly waiting for the graduates to come and get them. He would find, if he should make the proper investigation, that a class of women is being developed who are demanding a higher standard of morals in men than did those of past generations, and if they cannot get husbands who reach this standard they are making very satisfactory careers for themselves outside of marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since I know nothing of the merits of poetry, I am not able to pass any opinion upon this, but I can see that "reap" and "deep," "...prayers" and "bears," "ark" and "dark," "true" and "grew" do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And so they have left us feeling tired and old. They never cared for school anyway.... And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board. And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific inve...stigation and not by philosophy: pens are in many ways though not in all ways unlike rainbows, which are in many ways though not in all ways unlike after-images, which in turn are in many ways but not in all ways unlike pictures on the cinema-screen--and so on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in ...the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belon...gs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically develo...ped as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »