These pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is becau...se, in the first place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and, in the next, because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great lead...er who is just entering the room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the... writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an airhole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists..., has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, no...t the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having de...termined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit.... Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, ...but it isn't exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these t...hings, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »