I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o...r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble acti...ons and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have... lived in a cave and worn skins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window--I have the key--Get married Allen don't take drugs--the ...key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window. Love, your mother'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Henry B. Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was,... or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To grant woman an equality with man in the affairs of life is contrary to every tradition, every precedent, every inheritance, eve...ry instinct and every teaching. The acceptance of this idea is possible only to those of especially progressive tendencies and a strong sense of justice, and it is yet too soon to expect these from the majority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"To my thinking" boomed the Professor, begging the question as usual, "the greatest triumph of the human mind was the calculation ...of Neptune from the observed vagaries of the orbit of Uranus." "And yours," said the P.B.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the custom of the immortal gods to grant temporary prosperity and a fairly long period of impunity to those whom they plan t...o punish for their crimes, so that they may feel it all the more keenly as a result of the change in their fortunes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that, thr...ough them, had come into final collision. Back of Robert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life. Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition.... Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »