The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less... socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conc...eptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come from... such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My friend let loose, and sneezed. The air carefully gathered itself together again, after being locally at odds with prevailing cl...imate and momentarily boycotting the trade winds. The germs were assimilated, like immigrant Jews within the overall commercial prosperity of uniform America. My friend, who had recoiled, was now well distributed in equal blocks of masses behind the reformed nose, whose recent adventure was put aside with even temper as but the sowing of wild oats. The nose, to compensate for its rash act, became a model of decorum, and was elevated as a moral precept: seen, but not heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
TV's exploration of the game of consumption and sociability is, by the nature of the medium, on a far more subtle level than anyth...ing ever done by the movies. It can dramatize and expose and suggest ways of transcending social banality that are impossible to the screen, largely because of the very "actuality" and "interview" format of TV that at the same time produces so much of its rubbish. It is terrible but true that TV has probably elevated ten times as many family conversations in Sourwater, Georgia, as it has degraded there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis said that courage is common, but the immense esteem in which it is held proves it to be rare. Animal resistance, the instinct... of the male animal when cornered, is no doubt common; but the pure article, courage with eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the cannon's mouth, cheerfulness in lonely adherence to the right, is the endowment of elevated characters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting.... The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we think offhand of a politician, we think of a man who works for a partial interest. At the worst it is his own pocket. At t...he best it may be his party, his class, or an institution with which he is identified. We never feel that he can or will take into account all the interests concerned, and because bias and partisanship are the qualities of his conduct, we feel, unless we are naively afflicted with the same bias, that he is not to be trusted too far. Now the word "statesman," when it is not mere pomposity, connotes a man whose mind is elevated sufficiently above the conflict of contending parties to enable him to adopt a course of action which takes into account a greater number of interests in the perspective of a longer period of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »