Enthusiasm produces the most cruel disorders in human society; but its fury is like that of thunder and tempest, which exhaust the...mselves in a little time, and leave the air more calm and serene than before.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That the corruption of the best things produces the worst, is grown into a maxim, and is commonly proved, among other instances, b...y the pernicious effects of superstition and enthusiasm, the corruptions of true religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Enthusiasm, being the infirmity of bold and ambitious tempers, is naturally accompanied with a spirit of liberty; as superstition,... on the contrary, renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams ... then you must still regard America today with the same naive ent...husiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The differences between the President and the Prime Minister were at least in one respect something more than the obvious differen...ces of national character, education, and even temperament. For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow--despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have a sense of piety ever on your mind, and be ever mindful that this is subject to no change, but will last you as long as life ...and support you in death. Elevate your soul by prayer and by contemplation without mystical enthusiasm.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The tourist is first of all an adventurer. The dream is of the pioneer, the explorer, the great voyager or the conquering emperor.... He leaves the security of home far behind and sets out beyond the perimeters of the known world for fame, fortune and excitement. He wants to take on the minotaur, scale the Matterhorn, discover a lost Amazonian tribe or sample the delights of a Thai brothel.... The essence of the tourist adventure is exhibited in the contours of the excitements that it provides. And these contours are best inferred from the stories that are told and re-told with animation to relatives, friends and colleagues at home. It is virtually never what has been seen that is recounted with enthusiasm. When the sites are described it is in the form of ritualized cliches: the Eiffel Tower really is a wonder--we went up it, and you get such a nice view. It is rather the personal moments of the tour, moments of near-crisis, that in retrospect were exciting: when one of the suitcases failed to arrive off the luggage chute at Frankfort Airport. Touring itself has been turned into a routine, restricting adventure to those moments when routine breaks down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy flux ...itself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bog...us enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »