Well, when you're up there and you're all alone, see, it's just you and your ship and the sky. And you don't want anybody up there... with you, you don't want anybody to spoil it. Everything's kind of still, and you have a feeling that you're halfway to heaven. You don't even seem to hear the sound of your own motor, just a kind of a buzz, like the sky was calling you. Like the sky was singin' you a song.... Yeah. And somehow it's never eight o'clock up there, it's always now. And the earth is so far below you that it just doesn't matter anymore, the sky is the thing that's important. The sky is your pal. You feel like nudging it and saying, "Hiya sky, how are you today? And how was the old moon the last time you saw him?" The wind drift comes straight off the morning star and beautiful white clouds drift towards you. And they're like old friends. Friends you never want to say goodbye to. And you see a patch of clear air in between 'em and you duck in and out, like a porpoise rollin' in the ocean. And then you say to yourself, "Boy, oh boy, this is the only time a man is really ever alive. It's the only time he's really ever free." The old sky smiles back at you and says, "Boy, you're right. You're dead right."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free ...at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A republican government should be based on free and equal education among the people. While we have class and sectarian schools th...e parties supporting them will not give their fullest aid toward building up the public school system. If all of the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money and energies on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals. To be a success a republic must have a homogeneous people, and to do this it must have homogeneous schools.... I grow more and more opposed to [sectarian schools].LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Theater of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the ...cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface and perc...eives it so exclusively that the devil of hatred, despite all his terror-inspiring cruelty, never is entirely free of ridicule and of a somewhat dilettantish aspect. One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head. Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Renaissance was, as much as anything, a revolt from the logic of the Middle Ages. We speak of the Renaissance as the birth of ...rationalism; it was in many ways the birth of irrationalism. It is true that the medieval Schoolmen, who had produced the finest logic that the world has ever seen, had in later years produced more logic than the world can ever be expected to stand. They had loaded and lumbered up the world with libraries of mere logic; and some effort was bound to be made to free it from such endless chains of deduction. Therefore, there was in the Renaissance a wild touch of revolt, not against religion but against reason.... When all is said, there is something a little sinister in the number of mad people in Shakespeare. We say that he uses his fools to brighten the dark background of tragedy; I think he sometimes uses them to darken it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Have we any control over being born?," my friend asked in despair. "No, the job is done for us while we're sleeping, so to speak,... and when we wake up everything is all set. We merely appear, like an ornate celebrity wheeled out in a wheelchair." "I don't remember," my friend claimed. "No need to," I said: "what need have us free-loaders for any special alertness? We're done for."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women are to be lifted up to a physical equality with man by placing upon their shoulders equal burdens of labor, equal responsibi...lities of state-craft; they are to be brought down from their altruistic heights by being released from all obligations of purity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and made free of the world of passion and self-indulgence, after the model set them by men of low and materialistic ideals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Under an accumulation of staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent. No man knocks himself down; if his destiny knocks him... down, his destiny must pick him up again."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »