[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 »
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 »
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 »
Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. O...f all weaknesses he most disliked timed and half-hearted faith. He would rather have jumped at once to Strong's pure denial, than yield an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because it could not be explained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willin...gness to submit to her own annihilation.... The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Masculinity can only be experienced, achieved, recognized, and embodied in opposition to femininity. When men posit sex, violence,... and death as elemental erotic truths, they mean this--that sex, or fucking, is the act which enables them to experience their own reality, or identity, or masculinity most concretely; that violence, or sadism, is the means by which they actualize that reality, or identity, or masculinity; and that death, or negation, or nothingness, or contamination by the female is what they risk each time they penetrate into what they imagine to be the emptiness of the female hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are co...arse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Por...tland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »