The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.... Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we could do away with death, we wouldn't object; to do away with capital punishment will be more difficult. Were that to happen..., we would reinstate it from time to time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as diseases, is insane. It is an insa...nity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they... are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders' sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away ... is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a man's partner's killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him, he ...was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. As it happens, we're in the detective business; well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's, it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. Bad all around. Bad for every detective everywhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .... . and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who are our true rulers? The Negro poets, to be sure. Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of t...hem, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended (that is, almost spoilt), printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps with the world. Meanwhile, the poor author digs away with his hoe, utterly ignorant of his greatness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas wi...ll extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things--like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »