Johnny Rocco: Yeah, yeah, that's me. Sure, I was all of those things. And more! When Rocco talked everybody shut up and listened! ...What Rocco said went! Nobody was as big as Rocco! It'll be like that again only more so. I'll be back up there one of these days, and then you're really gonna see something! James Temple (with contempt): If the time ever comes when your kind can walk a city street in daylight with nothing to fear from the people.... Frank McCloud: The time has come, Mr. Temple. It's here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've been aboard this destroyer for two weeks now, and we've already been through four air attacks. I'm in the war at last, Doc. I... caught up with that task force that passed me by. I'm glad to be here. I had to be here, I guess. But I'm thinking now of you, Doc, and you, Frank, and Dolan, and Dawdy, and Insignia, and everyone else on that bucket. All the guys everywhere who sailed from tedium to apathy and back again with an occasional sidetrip to monotony. This is a tough crew on here and they have a wonderful battle record. But I've discovered, Doc, that the unseen enemy of this war is the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a terrible sort of suicide. And I know now that the ones who refuse to surrender to it are the strongest of all. Right now, I'm looking at something that's hanging over my desk, a preposterous hunk of brass attached to the most bilious piece of ribbon I've ever seen. I'd rather have it than the Congressional Medal of Honor. It tells me what I'll always be proudest of, that at a time in the world when courage counted most, I lived among sixty-two brave men. So Doc, and especially you, Frank, don't let those guys down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Margaret: Some people have life made for them. Frank: That's right, Mrs. Hammond, and some people make it for themselves. It'...s about time you took that ton of rock off your shoulders.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The only one who has ever been really mysterious." (Joan Crawford); "Her mystery was as thick as a London fog." (Tallulah Bankhea...d); "In a quick turn of her head, in a frank look, a boyish pout, in that proud glance from lowered lids, so pitying and yet so distant that in others it would be supercilious, in all those expressions of conscious beauty, which when imitated become clumsy, or arrogant, or ridiculous, there is a manifestation of what Hollywood cannot destroy. In the presence of this mystery all that is second-rate can be forgotten." (Cecil Beaton)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Traditionally, marriage involved a kind of bartering, rather than mutual inter-dependence or role sharing. Husbands financially an...d economically supported wives, while wives emotionally, psychologically and socially supported husbands. He brought home the bacon, she cooked it. He fixed the plumbing, she the psyche.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two archetypes pervade Western thinking on the subject of how reality is best apprehended, archetypes that have their ultimate ori...gin in Plato and Aristotle. For Plato sense data were at best a distraction from knowledge, which was the province of unaided reason. For Aristotle, knowledge consisted in generalizations, but these were derived in the first instance from information gathered from the outside world. These two models of human thinking, termed rationalism and empiricism, respectively, formed the major intellectual legacy of the West down to Descartes and Bacon, who represented, in the seventeenth century, the twin poles of epistemology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, th...ey do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminati...ng? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite unhypothetical assumption of aesthetic theory ("high ideals"), on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humour, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground. The very accent of the words "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" implies an instinctive perception that this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. For both are used in a derogatory sense. The "Highbrow" is the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept unpalatable virtue; while the "Lowbrow" is a good fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »