I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind a...nd spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Clear? Why a four-year-old child could understand this report! Run out and get me a four-year-old child. I can't make head or tail... out of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some of the offers that have come to me would never have come if I had not been President. That means these people are trying to h...ire not Calvin Coolidge, but a former President of the United States. I can't make that kind of use of the office.... I can't do anything that might take away from the Presidency any of its dignity, or any of the faith people have in it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Black women ... work because their husbands can't make enough money at their jobs to keep everything going.... They don't go to wo...rk to find fulfillment, or adventure, or glamour and romance, like so many white women think they are doing. Black women work out of necessity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We shall make mistakes, but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principles. I... remember that my old school master Dr. Peabody said in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled, he said things in life will not always run smoothly, sometimes we will be rising toward the heights and all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great thing to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unfortunately, nearly all the "sights" in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers' homes in ...the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy's, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of "Didn't he make a holy spectacle of himself?" An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress--these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some years ago, writing about stage adaptations of fiction, I noted: "There is a simple law governing the dramatization of novels:... if it is worth doing, it can't be done; if it can be done, it's not worth doing." Certain reviewers did me the honor of calling this Simon's Law, and I might as well state it now as far as the screen is concerned, "Simon's Law" may still serve as a useful warning but has no legality. For two reasons. First, because unlike the stage, the screen possesses as many resources as fiction, so that, for example, extended narration is possible on screen, backed up by an extensive visual scenario, but not on the stage, where it must become monotonous; similarly, stream of consciousness has its filmic equivalents in montage, voice-over dialogue, closeups and extreme closeups, dissolves, etc., whereas on stage, as mere verbiage, it cannot fail to bore. Secondly, because the screen can fully illustrate what the novel can only name or describe. Of course, this is a mixed blessing, because such illustration can make things overexplicit and oppressive; still, it is there as a resource for those who can effectively handle it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who have handled sciences have either been men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they ...only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, u...nless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »