When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them bo...th opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted ...strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit... and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complem...entary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may, or may not, have better child care instincts than your husband; but his can certainly be developed. If you don't respect ...the natural parenting talents that each of you has, you may inadvertently cast the two of you into the skewed but complementary roles of the Expert and the Dumb Apprentice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Change can take place only when liberal and radical pressures are both strong. Intelligent liberals have always recognized the deb...t they owe to radicals, whose existence permits liberals to push further than they would otherwise have dared, all the while posing as compromisers and mediators. Radicals, however, have been somewhat less sensible of their debt to liberals, partly because of the rather single-minded discipline radicals are almost forced to maintain, plagued as they always are by liberal backsliding and timidity on the one hand and various forms of self-destructiveness and romantic posing on the other.... Liberal reforms and radical change are thus complementary rather than antagonistic. Together they make it possible continually to test the limits of what can be done. Liberals never know whether the door is unlocked because they are afraid to try it. Radicals, on the other hand, miss many opportunities for small advances because they are unwilling to settle for so little.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All t...hese tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »