Cranks, in defending their mental constructs (and here, curiously, may be their closest approach to psycho-pathology and to seriou...s scholarship), can be formidable logicians, if not exactly sound reasoners. Most cranks, in fact, see themselves as free-lance scientists, scholars, or investigators of mechanical problems, assassination conspiracies, the origins of poetry, the destiny of the universe, the meaning of life, the nature of crankery, the fate of man, or the will of God. They share with more orthodox scholars both a professional curiosity and a possessive attitude toward whatever domain of knowledge they have chosen to make their province. They differ from them most critically in the soundness of their critical faculties. But is this difference really as great, as intrinsic to their personalities, as it first appears? Perhaps professional academics have no greater sense of limit, of proportion, and of really critical intelligence; it may be only the overwhelming weight of that institutional discipline that keeps the minds of scientists and scholars safely within the straight (and narrow) paths of academic orthodoxy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I realize that if it goes through it will be greatest jewel of my administration.... It is strange how one happens on this sort of... thing. When I made that speech in New York advocating the arbitration of questions, even those affecting the honor of a nation, I had no definite policy in view. I was inclined, if I remember rightly, merely to offset the antagonism to the four battleships for which I was then fighting, and I threw out that suggestion merely to draw the sting of the old [Andrew] Carnegie and other peace cranks, and now the suggestion threatens to become the main fact of my four years as president.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 »
A new kind of woman with deep-rooted values is changing the way we live. Market researchers call it "neo-traditionalism." To us it...'s a woman who has found her identity in herself, her home, her family.... She is part of an extraordinary social movement that is profoundly changing the way Americans look at living--and the way products are marketed. The home is again the center of American life, oatmeal is back on the breakfast table, families are vacationing together, watching movies at home, playing Monopoly again. Even the perfume ads are suddenly glorifying commitment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think of myself as a sex symbol or a servant. I think of myself as somebody who knows how to open the door of a 747 in the... dark, upside down, and under water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Rousseau's view (1762). . . most of the problems of education are problems of motivation, as teachers try to rush things. They ...talk of geography before the child knows the way around his own backyard. They teach history before the child understand anything about adult motivation. . . . It would be far better, to let questions arise naturally. . . . When a child is self-motivated, the teacher cannot keep him from learning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, i...n order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters o...f the uncircumcised triumph.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of the joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »