Whereas the child is chiefly playful and experimental, the adult focuses on specific and conscious experiences. He practices selec...tive inattention to the objects for which he has no immediate use and develops a kind of tunnel vision that helps him to move toward selected goals. This focusing on a limited range of experiences and goals is largely responsible for one's individual evolution and gives a deep and almost tragic significance to a statement made by Albert Camus in his novel La Chute: "Après un certain âge tout homme est responsable do son visage." An almost identical statement appears as the last entry in George Orwell's notebooks: "At 50, everyone has the face he deserves." There could not any more absolute affirmation of belief in personal responsibility for the quality of one's own life and character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The responsibilities of parenthood take on a more subtle cast during the middle years. . . . Our child is becoming a more consciou...s partner in his or her growth. . . . Each time our children take a new step, each time we allow them to move ahead to try something they've never tried before, we go through a period of doubt and questioning and ambivalent feelings until the new skill is mastered or the new rules are established. It is one of the most common experiences of parenthood, and it is also one of the most challenging.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit ...a single object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We can teach prevention. For little kids, the best protection is that they should not be alone in public places. All children shou...ld be conscious of strangers, and be discriminating and wary of them. This won't make them grow up suspicious as long as they have adults around whom they know and can trust: relatives, friends of their parents, parents of friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The only one who has ever been really mysterious." (Joan Crawford); "Her mystery was as thick as a London fog." (Tallulah Bankhea...d); "In a quick turn of her head, in a frank look, a boyish pout, in that proud glance from lowered lids, so pitying and yet so distant that in others it would be supercilious, in all those expressions of conscious beauty, which when imitated become clumsy, or arrogant, or ridiculous, there is a manifestation of what Hollywood cannot destroy. In the presence of this mystery all that is second-rate can be forgotten." (Cecil Beaton)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children are extraordinarily precious members of society; they are exquisitely alert, sensitive, and conscious of their surroundin...gs; and they are extraordinarily vulnerable to maltreatment or emotional abuse by adults who refuse to give them the profound respect and affection to which they are unconditionally entitled.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From all around the Third World, You hear the same story;... Rulers Asleep to all things at All times-- Conscious only of Riches, which they gather in a Coma-- IntravenouslyLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for... larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England's many spurious gifts to the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs... from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »