No civilization ... would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change.... Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when t...he sated man instructs the hungry one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the hu...man currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dule and wae for the order sent our lads to the Border; The English, for ance, by guile won the day:... The Flowers of the Forest, that foucht aye the foremost, The prime o' our land, are cauld in the clay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the long run, only woman remains true to mankind's foremost mission. Whatever she achieves, she achieves through herself, and a...lone. Man's master is the--public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
More than the changing of institutions we need the development of a national conscience, and the upbuilding of national character.... Men may boast of the aristocracy of blood, may glory in the aristocracy of talent, and be proud of the aristocracy of wealth, but there is one aristocracy which must ever outrank them all, and that is the aristocracy of character; and it is the women of a country who help to mold its character, and to influence if not determine its destiny; and in the political future of our nation woman will not have done what she could if she does not endeavor to have our republic stand foremost among the nations of the earth, wearing sobriety as a crown and righteousness as a garment and a girdle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tallulah [Bankhead] was the foremost naughty girl of her era but, in those days, "naughty" meant piquant, whereas values have so c...hanged that now, in the 1970s, it generally means nauseating.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »