[The political mind] is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeur... at another time. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driv...en to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me ...of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There had been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous--and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child o...f grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord bec...ause humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machin...e, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child's philosophy rests upon the assumption that the world outside is in gear with his own appetites. For this reason an adul...t with a childish character will ascribe an authority to his appetites which may easily land him in fanaticism or frustration, in a crazy indulgence or a miserable starvation. And to the environment he will ascribe a willingness to conform to him, a capacity to be owned by him, which land him in all sorts of delusions of grandeur. Only the extreme cases are in the asylums. The world is full of semi-adult persons who secretly nurse the notion that they are, or that by rights they ought to be, Don Juan, Napoleon, or the Messiah.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the de...lusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces..., to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »