Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well ...as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact... that the best voices available for combination with my mother's in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculous ...and dangerous by having its feet off the ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had been curiously depressed all day. In the night I wakened. First precise thought: I know why I'm depressed--nothing inspired ...is going on. Second: I demand that life be inspired every moment. Third: the only way to guarantee this is to have inspired conversation every moment. Fourth: most people never get so far as conversation; they haven't the stamina, and there is no time. Fifth: if I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer. Sixth: marvelous idea--salvation. Seventh: decision to do it. Deep sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood.... Wealth ...and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" ... has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we sent our first child off to school I experienced a jarring moment, an epiphany. I had been teaching young children for man...y years, advising parents on a wide range of issues, including the best and most painless ways to separate from their youngsters at school. When my own time came, I found that all my good advice to others was impossible to follow myself.... I felt like a midwife friend of mine who had assisted in the births of hundreds of babies before her own first child was born. In the middle of labor she cried out, "I've told hundreds of women, 'you can do it,' and it can't be done."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The question is not ... if art is enough to fulfill my life, but if I am true to the path I have set for myself, if I am the best ...I can be in the things I do. Am I living up to the reasons I became a singer in the first place?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two archetypes pervade Western thinking on the subject of how reality is best apprehended, archetypes that have their ultimate ori...gin in Plato and Aristotle. For Plato sense data were at best a distraction from knowledge, which was the province of unaided reason. For Aristotle, knowledge consisted in generalizations, but these were derived in the first instance from information gathered from the outside world. These two models of human thinking, termed rationalism and empiricism, respectively, formed the major intellectual legacy of the West down to Descartes and Bacon, who represented, in the seventeenth century, the twin poles of epistemology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »