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 »
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is an enormous chasm between the relatively rich and powerful people who make decisions in government, business, and finance... and our poorer neighbors who must depend on these decisions to alleviate the problems caused by their lack of power and influence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!... A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they ...reveal! Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures . . .LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
they remained free in the heavenly chasm, remained angels, but dreaming angels,... each imbued with the mysteries of the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now both legs were hanging outside and he had only to let go of what he was holding on to--and he was saved. Before letting go he ...looked down. Some kind of hasty preparations were under way there: the window reflections gathered together and leveled themselves out, the whole chasm was seen to divide into dark and pale squares, and at the instant when Luzhin unclenched his hand, at the instant when icy air gushed unto his mouth, he saw exactly what kind of eternity was obligingly and inexorably spread out before him. The door was burst in. "Aleksandr Ivanovich, Aleksandr Ivanovich," roared several voices. But there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which ha...ve been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than ...sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay... my head.... The colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper.... Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »