Unthinking people speak of the motion picture as the medium of "action"; the truth is that the stage is the medium of action while... the screen is the medium of reaction. It is through identification with the person acted upon on the screen, and not with the person acting, that the film builds up its oscillating power with the audience. This is understood instinctively by expert film-makers, but to my knowledge it has never been formulated. At any emotional crisis in a film, when a character is saying something which profoundly affects another, it is to this second character that the camera instinctively roves, perhaps in close-up; and it is then that the hearts of the audience quiver and open in release, or rock with laughter or shrink with pain, leap to the screen and back again in swift-growing vibrations. The great actors of the stage are actors; of the screen, re-actors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often. God's will be done, and... if He decrees that we are to have a great number of children why we must try to bring them up as useful and exemplary members of society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the earl...y Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power,--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its s...ervitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no such thing as a value-free concept of deviance; to say homosexuals are deviant because they are a statistical minority... is, in practice, to stigmatize them. Nuns are rarely classed as deviants for the same reason, although if they obey their vows they clearly differ very significantly from the great majority of people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the... other fellow to make the first move--and he, in turn, waits for you. The minute a person whose word means a great deal dares to take the open- hearted and courageous way, many others follow. Not everyone can be turned aside from meanness and hatred, but the great majority of Americans is heading in that direction. I have a great belief in the future of my people and my country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given... themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Indiana was really, I suppose, a Democratic State. It has always been put down in the book as a state that might be carried by a c...lose and careful and perfect organization and a great deal of--[from audience: "soap"Ma reference to purchased votes, the word being followed by laughter]. I see reporters here, and therefore I will simply say that everybody showed a great deal of interest in the occasion, and distributed tracts and political documents all through the country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's ...intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »