As for the peasant populations of a great part of the world, they aren't so much anxious as hungry. They aren't anxious about whet...her they will get a salary raise, or which of the three colleges of their choice they will be admitted to, or whether to buy a Ford or Cadillac, or whether the kind of TV set they want is too expensive. They are hungry, cold and, in many parts of the world, they dread that local warfare, bandits, political coups may endanger their homes, their meager livelihoods and their lives. But surely they are not anxious. For anxiety, as we have come to use it to describe our characteristic state of mind, can be contrasted with the active fear of hunger, loss, violence and death. Anxiety is the appropriate emotion when the immediate personal terror--of a volcano, an arrow, the sorcerer's spell, a stab in the back and other calamities, all directed against one's self--disappears.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to characte...r as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded--a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine tha...t our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and... glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which we have been born heir.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This journal is a relief. When I am tired ... out comes this, and down goes every thing. But I can't read it over--and God knows w...hat contradictions it may contain. If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one's self than to any one else) every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physiq...ue of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one's self, that we alone can prevent them from disgusting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion in a corner, without any more ado or ceremony, than feed upon turkey at ano...ther man's table, where one is fain to sit mincing and chewing his meat an hour together, drink little, be always wiping his fingers and his chops, and never dare to cough nor sneeze, though he has never so much a mind to it, nor do a many things which a body may do freely by one's self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of t...ravel and change.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sens...e of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... woman's cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will hav...e her "rights," and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and our fair land will have been taught the secret of universal courtesy which is after all nothing but the art, the science, and the religion of regarding one's neighbor as one's self, and to do for him as we would, were conditions swapped, that he do for us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »