Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better th...an you what you are going to tell them; when, in their turn, they begin to speak, they repeat to you with the greatest confidence, as if dealing with their own property, the things that they have heard you say yourself at some other place.... A capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is time to provide a smashing answer for those cynical men who say that a democracy cannot be honest, cannot be efficient.... W...e have in the darkest moments of our national trials retained our faith in our own ability to master our own destiny.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to ...conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where do whites fit in the New Africa? Nowhere, I'm inclined to say ... and I do believe that it is true that even the gentlest an...d most westernised Africans would like the emotional idea of the continent entirely without the complication of the presence of the white man for a generation or two. But nowhere, as an answer for us whites, is in the same category as remarks like What's the use of living? in the face of the threat of atomic radiation. We are living; we are in Africa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like ident...ical propositions.... Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakespeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakespeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
--The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his li...ps and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoral...ist: for what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the struggle between good and evil as the very wheel in the machinery of things: a translation of morals into the metaphysical, as force, cause, and end-in-itself, is his work. But this question itself is at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality: as a result, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than any other thinker--all history is after all the refutation by experiment of the principle of this so-called "moral world order"Mwhat is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the supreme virtue--this means exactly the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist" who flees from reality; Zarathustra has more intestinal fortitude than all other thinkers put together. To speak the truth and to shoot well with arrows, that is Persian virtue.--Am I understood?--The self- overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite--into me--that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »