Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost ...in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unflecked with... anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O my black soul! Now thou art summoned By sickness, death's herald, and champion;... Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done Treason,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was in grade school and we had to write papers about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I wanted to be a social worker o...r a missionary or a teacher. Then I got involved with tennis, and everything was just me, me, me. I was totally selfish and thought about myself and nobody else, because if you let up for one minute, someone was going to come along and beat you. I really wouldn't let anyone or any slice of happiness enter.... I didn't like the characteristics that it took to become a champion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But now Miss America, World's champion woman, you take your promenading self down into the cobalt blue waters of the Caribbean and... see what happens. You meet a lot of darkish men who make vociferous love to you, but otherwise pay you no mid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are so many intellectual and moral angels battling for rationalism, good citizenship, and pure spirituality; so many and suc...h eminent ones, so very vocal and authoritative! The poor devil in man needs all the support and advocacy he can get. The artist is his natural champion. When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his gentle repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his god being a jew. People co...uld put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles. Your god was a jew. Because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhereabouts in the county Sligo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer c...an cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as we know, has ever swum the Atlantic Ocean, or is likely to do so. Even a champion swimmer, if he had business which required to spend alternate weeks in Paris and London, would not make the trip regularly by swimming the English Channel. Although we can force ourselves through water by skill and main strength, for all practical purposes our ability to traverse water is only as good as our ships or our airplanes. And so with the activities of our brains. Thinking is probably as foreign to human nature as is water; it is an unnatural element into which we throw ourselves with hesitation, and in which we flounder once we are there. We have learned, during the millenniums, to do rather well with thinking, but only if we buoy ourselves up with words. Some thinking of a simple sort we can do without words, but difficult and sustained thinking, presumably, is completely impossible without their aid, as traversing the Atlantic Ocean is presumably impossible without instruments or supramarine transportation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In France it is rude to let a conversation drop; in England it is rash to keep it up. No one there will blame you for silence. Whe...n you have not opened your mouth for three years, they will think: "This Frenchman is a nice quiet fellow." Be modest. An Englishman will say, "I have a little house in the country"; when he invites you to stay with him you will discover that the little house is a place with three hundred bedrooms. If you are a world tennis-champion, say, "Yes, I don't play too badly." If you have crossed the Atlantic alone in a small boat, say, "I do a little sailing."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All is best, though we oft doubt, What th' unsearchable dispose... Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft he seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns And to his faithful Champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns And all that band them to resist His uncontroulable intent, His servants he with new acquist Of true experience from this great event With peace and consolation hath dismist, And calm of mind all passion spent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »