Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me. Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me ...that you may be justified?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So-called "austerity," the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path.... "Pull in your belt" is a slogan closely related to "gird up your loins," or the guns-butter metaphor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the... Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We hear much of chivalry of men towards women; but ... it vanishes like dew before the summer sun when one of us comes into compet...ition with the manly sex. Let a woman sit, weep, wring her hands, and exult in her own helplessness, and the modern knight buckles on his imaginary breastplate and draws his sword in her behalf; but when the woman girds up her loins for the battle of life, ready to fight like a lioness, if need be, to put food in the mouths of her children, let her select for her field the living-room or the cooking range.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So, laying his cheek against the dresser's wooden one, He died making up stories, the ones... Not every child wanted to listen to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next we come to the bronchial buster, or the man (it is usually a man) who, being in the throes of a terrific throat and tube trou...ble chooses that night for theater-going.... He will soon learn to pick his pauses with finesse. It does no good to cough while there is a great deal of noise going on on the stage. No one can hear. The time is just as the star is about to do a little low speaking to her dying lover or when the hero, alone in his garret, goes silently over to the fireplace and tears up the letter. There for a good rousing bark, my hearty, followed by a series of short sharp ones like those of a coxswain! If possible the appearance of apoplexy should be simulated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.... For autobiography has to do with time, with seque...nce and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form--it may be called fleeting or eternal--is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to po...or suffering humanity than anything else that has "cast up" in my time or is like to--this art by which even the "poor" can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We urgently need a debate about the best ways of supporting families in modern America, without blinders that prevent us from seei...ng the full extent of dependence and interdependence in American life. As long as we pretend that only poor or abnormal families need outside assistance, we will shortchange poor families, overcompensate rich ones, and fail to come up with effective policies for helping families in the middle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »