Two men live sixty-three years each. They meet face to face four times. One is superbly handsome, the finest flower of a civilizat...ion now vanished. The other is short and awkward both physically and in manner, the type of fellow (according to H.L. Mencken) who would say to you: "Meet the wife." Yet the society that one symbolizes is narrow and provincial, grooved, rooted, and the world of the other is wide, expanding, youthful, growing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or termi...nal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of ...behavior which are valid according to the system's ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible..., to give civilized entertainment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me ...of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, and... its salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »