Life baffles and seems almost to mock. It refuses long to remain consistently one thing or another and it seldom puts us into one ...mood without violating it soon after. But Art, seeming to have for human dignity a respect which Life consistently lacks, grants us at least our right to sorrow fully and freely when sorrow is called for or to laugh our laugh out when laughter is appropriate. The artist selects and classifies what nature mingles in a hideous confusion and in doing so he is, in one of his many ways, adapting the universe to our minds by presenting it in an order which our emotions can follow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If tragedy is made effective by provoking the phenomenon which psychology calls "empathy"Mby causing us, that is to say, actually ...to participate in the feelings of another--pure comedy must achieve its effects by completely inhibiting that phenomenon and by establishing a sense of separateness from the creatures whose antics we observe. Such sympathy as we feel for them is lofty and patronizing, like our sympathy for a child whose sorrows we know to be (however intense for him) transitory and trivial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Jefferson Smith: If you thought as much as being honest as you do of being smart ... Diz: Honest? Why, we're the only ones wh...o can afford to be honest in what we tell the voters. We don't have to be re-elected like politicians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Jefferson Smith: I hate to stand here and try your patience like this, but either I'm dead right or I'm crazy. Senator MacPhe...rson: You wouldn't care to put that to a vote, would you, Senator?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Dear Captain Smith,' the ghost replied, 'you've used me ungenteelly. The crowner's quest goes hard with me because I've acte...d frailly, And Parson Biggs won't bury me, though I am dead Miss Bailey.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two men live sixty-three years each. They meet face to face four times. One is superbly handsome, the finest flower of a civilizat...ion now vanished. The other is short and awkward both physically and in manner, the type of fellow (according to H.L. Mencken) who would say to you: "Meet the wife." Yet the society that one symbolizes is narrow and provincial, grooved, rooted, and the world of the other is wide, expanding, youthful, growing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then came the Lord Chamberlain with his white staff, And all the people began to laugh;... And then the Queen began to speak, 'You're welcome home, Sir Francis Drake.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shake off your heavy trance, and leap into a dance,... Such as no mortals use to tread, fit only for Apollo To play to, for the Moon to lead, And all the Stars to follow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »