In general, one may pronounce kissing dangerous. A spark of fire has often been struck out of the collision of lips, that has blow...n up the whole magazine of virtue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The distinction between the two types of art is a difference of density rather than of species. In the same number of bars of Beet...hoven and Sousa, there is, in Beethoven, more of the essence of music, giving a thicker, more intense effect likely to alienate the unfamiliar listener by "boring" him, just as the palate accustomed to that richer food is bored by the thinness of the popular tune. The feeling that this is not the only difference is due to the fact that as an art grows more and more complex and dense, the number of relations among simple elements increases until those relations look like extraordinarily refined experiences denied to the common herd. Yet there is no real barrier to be leaped over by an effort of genius between understanding a "vulgar" dance tune and a Beethoven symphony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding o...f that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Causists have tried to twist "doing good" into another form of "doing evil," and have said "you get pleasure yourself by giving th...is pleasure to another: so it is merely a refined kind of selfishness, as your own pleasure is a motive for what you do." I say, "it is not selfishness, that my own pleasure should be a motive so long as it is not the motive that would outweigh the other, if the two came into collision." The "selfish man" is he who would do the thing, even if it harmed others, so long as it gave him pleasure: the "unselfish man" is he who would still do the thing, even if it gave him no pleasure, so long as it pleased others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that, thr...ough them, had come into final collision. Back of Robert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life. Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition.... Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collisi...on, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,... Felt in the tingling bruises of collision, And known to captains as esprit de corps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan c...ondition--hyper-density--without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man's nature--opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal an...tagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »