Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to ...(the square root of 300), or about seventeen years and a half, when--that is, in 1917Mit would pass into another or Ethereal Phase, which, for half a century, science has been promising, and which would last only (the square root of 17.5), or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disap...pointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescence has been recognised as a stage of human development since medieval times--long, long before the industrial revolution-...-and, as it is now, has long been seen as a phase which centers on the fusion of sexual and social maturity. Indeed, adolescence as a concept has as long a history as that of puberty, which is sometimes considered more concrete, and hence much easier to name and to recognize.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in th...e memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman's adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self.... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its p...eculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themsel...ves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent,... on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because ...it is already there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the... very same reasons to think there were that we have now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long a...s the swatter remained in view....Permanent transformation had to be internal....The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »