We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that ...we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nihilism as a symptom that the losers have no more consolation: that they destroy in order to be destroyed, that without morality ...they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves"Mthat they put themselves on the level of the opposite principle and for their part also want power in that they compel the mighty to be their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism, renunciation, once all existence has lost its "meaning."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My own voice spoke to people, anyone, friends, strangers on the street, saying,... "I am Mr. Rabbit." The flesh itself had become mad and at three mirrors this was confirmed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »