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 »
I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the libert...y of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her--Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone--a long galaxy of great women.... Those older women have gone on, and most of those who worked with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop.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 »
Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? T...hat Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.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 a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one an...other are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.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 »