It may cost me twenty thousand francs; but for twenty thousand francs, I will have the right to rail against the iniquity of human...ity, and to devote to it my eternal hatred.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to compl...ete it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity--not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of ...the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lies fall like flaxen threads from the skies All over America, and the fact that some of them are true of course... Doesn't so much not matter as serve to justify The whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct delight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact... that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their po...wer, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manlin...ess, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing so...ciety for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity--advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »