Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic i...s a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhym...e, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In order to get to East Russet you take the Vermont Central as far as Twitchell's Falls and change there for Torpid River Junction..., where a spur line takes you right into Gormley. At Gormley you are met by a buckboard which takes you back to Torpid River Junction again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... until now, it is a mentally isolated, a truely [sic] colonial position, which has been occupied by the women physicians of Ame...rica. When a century shall have elapsed after general intellectual education has become diffused among women; after two or three generations have had increased opportunities for inheritance of trained intellectual aptitudes; after the work of establishing, in the face of resolute opposition, the right to privileged work in addition to the drudgeries imposed by necessity, shall have ceased to preoccupy the energies of women; after selfish monopolies of privilege and advantage shall have broken down; after the rights and capacities of women as individuals shall have received thorough, serious, and practical social recognition; when all these changes shall have been effected for about a hundred years, it will then be possible to perceive results from the admission of women to the profession of medicine, at least as widespread as those now obviously due to their admission to the profession of teaching.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wit is often concise and sparkling, compressed into an original pun or metaphor. Brevity is said to be its soul. Humor can be more... leisurely, diffused through a whole story or picture which undertakes to show some of the comic aspects of life. What it devalues may be human nature in general, by showing that certain faults or weaknesses are universal. As such it is kinder and more philosophic than wit which focuses on a certain individual, class, or social group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused--in place o...f the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery--by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press--their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus bein...g diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the mother's womb holds us for ten months not in preparation for itself but for the region to which we seem to be discharg...ed when we are capable of drawing breath and surviving in the open, so in the span extending from infancy to old age we are ripening for another birth. Another beginning awaits us, another status. We cannot yet bear heaven's light except at intervals; look unfalteringly, then, to that decisive hour which is the body's last but not the soul's. All that lies about you look upon as the luggage in a posting station; you must push on. At your departure Nature strips you as bare as at your entry. You cannot carry out more than you brought in; indeed, you must lay down a good part of what you brought into life. The envelope of skin, which is your last covering, will be stripped off; the flesh and the blood which is diffused and courses through the whole of it will be stripped off; the bones and sinews which are the structural support of the shapeless and precarious mass will be stripped off. That day which you dread as the end is your birth into eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the most important education that we have is the education which now I am glad to say is being accepted as the proper one,... and one which ought to be widely diffused, that industrial, vocational education which puts young men and women in a position from which they can by their own efforts work themselves to independence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »