Henry Adams and Henry James invite obvious comparisons. Exact contemporaries on the American literary scene, both were beguiled by... European culture, both were distressed by American ills. Philosophically and aesthetically they also had much in common. But these two writers arrived at logically opposite extremes in struggling with the historical, political, economic, and social problems of their age. Adams came to view the basic impulse toward unity as the force that could give coherence to the multiplicity of experience; he viewed philosophies of history as aesthetic systems that made it possible to organize the incoherence of historical and natural events. James, on the other hand, felt that art and history were inextricably related, and that history could be viewed in terms of the differing interpretations man designs to relate himself to the social or natural world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are the sons and daughters of the world they saved. [Now is our moment] to make common cause with other countries to ensure a w...orld of peace and prosperity for yet another generation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One thing is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here, here in America, is the home of man. After all th...e deductions which are to be made of for our pitiful politics, which stake every gravest national question on the silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit in the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is made for our frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its balance, redresses itself presently, which offers opportunity to the human mind not known in any other region.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To stand on common ground here and there gritty with pebbles... yet elsewhere 'fine and mellow-- uncommon fine for ploughing' there to labor planting the vegetable wordsLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that ...we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nihilism as a symptom that the losers have no more consolation: that they destroy in order to be destroyed, that without morality ...they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves"Mthat they put themselves on the level of the opposite principle and for their part also want power in that they compel the mighty to be their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism, renunciation, once all existence has lost its "meaning."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the progress of politics, as in the common occurrences of life, we are not only apt to forget the ground we have travelled over..., but frequently neglect to gather up experiences as we go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one lives in this room without confronting the whiteness of the wall... behind the poems, planks of books, photographs of dead heroines. Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »