He ketched a frog one day and took him home and said he cal'lated to educate him; and so he never done nothing for three months bu...t set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet he did learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut--see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat.... Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most anything--and I believe him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so... are the sons of men snared in an evil time,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine... for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat... with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout--not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander... helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities--a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »