In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian ...steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi'ite fundamentalists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little une...asy. Poor Richard is at once too goody-goody and too worldly. He argues the prudential approach to life almost too well: he blends copybook morality with eighteenth-century realism; his is the philosophy of the main chance without the cushioning of the noble motive. The special quality in Franklin is that he foreshadowed, with his philistine counsel, what America was to become, while indicating, through his unflinching worldliness, what it would cease to be. The better, the more central, the more congenial spokesman was Emerson, whose gift for giving a special emphasis and elevation to words has offered us a method for sliding over or circumventing things; whose fine aphorisms are the ancestors, at times even the blood brothers, of our trademarks and slogans; whose own transcendental visions coagulated or curdled into a great variety of mystical con-games; and whose deep concern for ideas could be made a kind of evasion of realities. Unlike Poor Richard, Emerson doesn't show us up--nor for that matter, pin us down. He is genuinely great without being uncomfortably specific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America.... I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mer...cy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the Department of Justice is committed to asking one central question of everything we do: What is the right thing to do? Now ...that can produce debate, and I want it to be spirited debate. I want the lawyers of America to be able to call me and tell me: Janet, have you lost your mind?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The preacher then went on to criticise the attitude of religion towards science. "If there is still a feeling of hostility between... them ... it is no longer the fault of religion. There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is so no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea,--that idea which the church has never ceased to embody,--I AM!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Society' in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all the good, brave, unassuming men, betwe...en the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these has a free pass in every city and village, 'good for this generation only,' and it depends on each to make use of this pass or not as it may happen to suit his or her fancy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have... lived in a cave and worn skins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one an...other are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it domina...tes the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn'...t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »