I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of th...e heart, everything falls away except one's native State;Mneither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is something quixotic in me about money, something meek and guilty. I want it and like it. But I cannot imagine insistin...g on it, pressing it out of people. I always vaguely feel: why should I have money when other people have it not? It is like taking the biggest piece of cake. And I can never feel that I have earned it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us in...capable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well ...as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever there's a big war coming on, you should rope off a big field. And on the big day, you should take all the kings and their... cabinets and their generals, put 'em in the center dressed in their underpants and let them fight it out with clubs. The best country wins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
True love never goes without respect; and its counterfeit is often obliged to feign it, till an occasion serves to throw it out of... the windows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... God allows the wheat and the tares to grow up together, and ... the tares frequently get the start of the wheat and kill it ou...t. The only difference between the wheat and human beings is that the latter have intellect and ought to combine and pull out the tares, root and branch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »