A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you'v...e been, a decompression chamber between Here and There. Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You use the phrase "brutal Rebels." Don't be cheated in that way. There are enough "brutal Rebels" no doubt, but we have brutal of...ficers and men too. I have had men brutally treated by our own officers on this raid [to Lynchburg, Va.]. And there are plenty of humane Rebels. I have seen a good deal of it on this trip. War is a cruel business and there is brutality in it on all sides, but it is very idle to get up anxiety on account of any supposed peculiar cruelty on the part of Rebels. Keepers of prisons in Cincinnati, as well as in Danville, are hard-hearted and cruel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer c...an cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as we know, has ever swum the Atlantic Ocean, or is likely to do so. Even a champion swimmer, if he had business which required to spend alternate weeks in Paris and London, would not make the trip regularly by swimming the English Channel. Although we can force ourselves through water by skill and main strength, for all practical purposes our ability to traverse water is only as good as our ships or our airplanes. And so with the activities of our brains. Thinking is probably as foreign to human nature as is water; it is an unnatural element into which we throw ourselves with hesitation, and in which we flounder once we are there. We have learned, during the millenniums, to do rather well with thinking, but only if we buoy ourselves up with words. Some thinking of a simple sort we can do without words, but difficult and sustained thinking, presumably, is completely impossible without their aid, as traversing the Atlantic Ocean is presumably impossible without instruments or supramarine transportation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the wor...ld as a disaster area from which lucky or pushy people emigrate to the Promised Land. Alternatively, they think of other nations as mere showplaces for picturesque scenery, odd flora and fauna and quaint artifacts. The American tourist abroad therefore wears clothes suitable for a trip to a disaster area, or for a visit to a museum or zoo: comfortable, casual, brightly colored, relatively cheap: not calculated to arouse envy or pick up dirt. Britain, on the other hand, remains in imagination a world empire. Its citizens go abroad as representatives of the Top Nation, concerned to uphold its reputation and present a good example to lesser races. Britons therefore dress up rather than down for travel, whatever the local conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all over ...the place for no sensible reason. A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We know that babies develop as well in nonmaternal as in maternal care, as long as the care is of good quality. The issue is not w...ho gives the care but the quality of that care,... The guilt trip is, in my view, a hangover of another era and of unacknowledged tactics to keep women in their proper place--at home full-time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not su...rprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My idea of good company ... is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I c...all good company.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While criticism or fear of punishment may restrain us from doing wrong, it does not make us wish to do right. Disregarding this si...mple fact is the great error into which parents and educators fall when they rely on these negative means of correction. The only effective discipline is self-discipline, motivated by the inner desire to act meritoriously in order to do well in one's own eyes, according to one's own values, so that one may feel good about oneself may "have a good conscience."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »