While girls [age 9ââ¬â12] appear to have much more social know-how, they are characteristically cliquey, disloyal, cruel..., insecure, and a bit bitchy now. Today's best friend becomes tomorrow's discard. Parents watch in horror at what seem to be total personality changes in previously lovely, upright little girls. Sometimes girls are just as unsettled by their behavior as the disapproving elders who watch them. Sometimes they are unregenerate, relishing their freewheeling and dealing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as chara...cteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An emotion is a tendency to feel, and an instinct is a tendency to act, characteristically, when in the presence of a certain obje...ct in the environment. But the emotions also have their bodily "expression," which may involve strong muscular activity (as in fear or anger, for example); and it becomes a little hard in many cases to separate the description of the "emotional" condition from that of the "instinctive" reaction which one and the same object may provoke.... Every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well. The only distinction one may draw is that the reaction called emotional terminates in the subject's own body, whilst the reaction called instinctive is apt to go farther and enter into practical relations with the exciting object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a sound justification for most scientific activity is going to be found, it will eventually come perhaps from a recognition tha...t man's sense of curiosity about the world and himself is every bit as compelling as his need for clothing and food.... Making sense of the world and one's place in that world has roots deep within the human psyche.... We can drop the dangerous pretense that science is legitimate only in so far as it contributes to our material well-being or to our store of perennial truths. Viewed in this light, the repudiation of theoretical scientific inquiry is tantamount to a denial of what may be our most characteristically human trait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other th...ing is black except a coffin--a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most works of literature have a beginning, middle, and an end. Most works of pornography do not. A typical piece of pornographic f...iction will usually have some kind of crude excuse for a beginning, but having once begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere. This impulse or compulsion to repeat, to repeat endlessly, is one of pornography's most striking qualities. A pornographic work of fiction characteristically develops by unremitting repetition and minute mechanical variation--the words that may describe the process are again, again, again, and more, more, more. We also observed that although pornography is obsessed with the idea of pleasure, of infinite pleasure, the idea of gratification, of an end to pleasure (pleasure being here an endless experience of retentiveness, without release) cannot develop. If form in art consists in the arousal in the reader of certain expectations and the fulfillment of those expectations, then in this context too pornography is resistant to form and opposed to art. For fulfillment implies completion, gratification, an end; and it is as an end, a conclusion of any kind, that pornography most resists. The ideal pornographic novel, I should repeat, would go on forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using "good" as our example. Calling something good is char...acteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of "good" is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She that was ever fair, and never proud, Had tongue at will, and yet was never loud... ... She that could think, and ne'er disclose her mind, See suitors following, and not look behind. She was a wight, if ever such wight were-- To suckle fools and chronicle small beer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »