And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book o...f life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Co...ngress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth, The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons... Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere ... The summer demands and takes away too much, But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just why I, out of 3,000,000 users of the Free Public Library in 1919 (2,573,591 of whom pencilled vitriolic comments in the margi...ns of the books), should have been elected to do this work is still a great mystery to my family.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I read The Sound and the Fury or Middlemarch, I'm filled with the aromas of either book, with past readings and relationships t...o the characters, with a whole continent of language and scenes, but the books don't frighten me. I can enter into their dream songs, and leave at my own will. But if I'm watching Casablanca on the wall, I'll let my eye slip past the phony details, the studio-bound streets, the laughable sense of a fabricated city, and drift into that dream of Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Cafe Americain, which exists outside any laws of physics, like the eternal dream of Hollywood itself, a little dopey, but with a power we can't resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professio...nal readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I- Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The books may say that nine-month-olds crawl, say their first words, and are afraid of strangers. Your exuberantly concrete and sp...ecial nine-month-old hasn't read them. She may be walking already, not saying a word and smiling gleefully at every stranger she sees. . . . You can support her best by helping her learn what she's trying to learn, not what the books say a typical child ought to be learning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever any skeptic or bigot claims to be heard on the question of intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with the books ...of Plato, where all his pert objections have once for all been disposed of. If not, he has no right to our time. Let him go and find himself answered there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as a...n illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go thou and buy the books and writings of certain scribes and Pharisees which I shall name unto you, and thou shalt learn everythi...ng of good and of evil. Yea, thou shalt learn everything of good and of evil. Yea, thou shalt know as much as the Chief of the Niggerati, who is called Carl Van Vechten.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »