It took nine years, and a great depression, and two wars ending in defeat, and one surrender without war, to break my faith in the... benign power of the press. Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to the record of an old inhabitant of Tyngsborough, now dead, whose farm we were now gliding past, one of the greatest f...reshets on this river took place in October, 1785, and its height was marked by a nail driven into an apple tree behind his house.... The revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as interesting revelations, on this river's banks, as on the Euphrates or the Nile. This apple tree, which stands within a few rods of the river, is called "Elisha's apple tree," from a friendly Indian who was anciently in the service of Jonathan Tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by his own race in one of the Indian wars,--the particulars of which affair were told us on the spot. He was buried close by, no one knew exactly where, but in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water standing over the grave caused the earth to settle where it had once been disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the form and size of the grave, revealed its locality; but this was now lost again, and no future flood can detect it; yet, no doubt, nature will know how to point it out in due time, if it be necessary, by methods yet more searching and unexpected. Thus there is not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand the body, marked by a fresh mound in the churchyard, but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have seen in my time two enormous extensions of the suffrage to men--one in America and one in England. But neither the negroes ...in the South nor the agricultural laborers in Great Britain had shown before they got the ballot any capacity of government; for they had never had the opportunity to take the first steps of political action. Very different has been the history of the march of women toward a recognized position in the State. We have had to prove our ability at each stage of progress, and have gained nothing without having satisfied a test of capacity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss... Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within ...one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in." Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Great is your faithfulness, O God, Creator, with you no shadow of turning we see.... You do not change, your compassions they fail not; all of your goodness forever will be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice an...d the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women;Mit... requires a great many cultivated women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you have one Madame de Staël.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »