What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the ...law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative... as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During the fifties, for example, the American character appeared with some consistency that became a model of manhood adopted by m...any men: the Fifties male. He got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children and admired discipline. Reagan is a sort of mummified version of this dogged type. This sort of man didn't see women's souls well, but he appreciated their bodies; and his view of culture and America's part in it was boyish and optimistic. Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity. Unless he has an enemy, he isn't sure that he is alive. The Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.... During the sixties, another sort of man appeared. The waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was. If manhood meant Vietnam, did they want any part of it? Meanwhile, the feminist movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become conscious of concerns and sufferings that the Fifties male labored to avoid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ah, the truth, what a thing it is! I sacrifice so much for it, with people: I forego, for truth's sake, discretion, loyalty, diplo...macy, tact, polite manners, elegance, grace, poise, balance, good taste, conformity, image-role, fashionableness, polish, confidences, promises, ambition, consistency, identity, clarity, comprehensibleness, good will, hypocrisy, and lots of other things--amass sacrifice, at truth's altar. God! is truth worth it? I hope it is. It better be, in fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our children are counting on us to provide two things: consistency and structure. Children need parents who say what they mean, me...an what they say, and do what they say they are going to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. ...Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all familiar with the Aristotelian argument about the relation of poetry to action. Action, or praxis, is the world of even...ts; and history, in the broadest sense, may be called a verbal imitation of action, or events put in the forms of words. The historian imitates action directly; he makes specific statements about what happened, and is judged by the truth of what he says. What really happened is the external model of his pattern of words, and he is judged by the adequacy with which his words reproduce that model. The poet, in dramas and epics at least, also imitates actions in words, like the historian. But the poet makes no specific statements of fact, and hence is not judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says. The poet has no external model for his imitation, and is judged by the integrity or consistency of his verbal structure. The reason is that he imitates the universal, not the particular; he is concerned not with what happened but with what happens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents are led to believe that they must be consistent, that is, always respond to the same issue the same way. Consistency is go...od up to a point but your child also needs to understand context and subtlety . . . much of adult life is governed by context: what is appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another; the way something is said may be more important than what is said. . . .LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »