What makes the race analogy complicated is that gays, as demographic composites, do indeed "have it better" than blacks--and yet i...n many ways contemporary homophobia is more virulent than contemporary racism. According to one monitoring group, one in four gay men has been physically assaulted as a result of his perceived sexual orientation; about fifty percent have been threatened with violence. (For lesbians, the incidence is lower but still disturbing.) A moral consensus now exists in this country that discriminating against blacks as teachers, priests, or tenants is simply wrong. (That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.) For much of the country, however, the moral legitimacy of homosexuals, remains very much in question.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has been observed that while anti-black racism charges its object with inferiority, anti-Semitism charges its object with iniqu...ity. The racist believes that blacks are incapable of running anything by themselves. The anti-Semite believes (in one popular bit of folklore) that thirteen rabbis rule the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yes, dance. Dance and dream. Dream that you're Mrs. Henry Jekyll of Harley Street, dancing with your own butler and six footmen. D...ream that they've all turned into white mice and crawled into an eternal pumpkin.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 »
Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could ha...ve thought he had never developed a "style" is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson's prose. The latter's sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn't have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Chief Defect of Henry King Was chewing little bits of String.... At last he swallowed some which tied Itself in ugly Knots inside.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fox, he felt, had never seen his past disposed of like a fall of water. He had never measured off his day in moments: another-...-another--another. But now, thrown down so deeply in himself, into the darkness of the well, surprised by pain and hunger, might he not revert to an earlier condition, regain capacities which formerly were useless to him, pass from animal to Henry, become human in his prison, X his days, count, wait, listen for another--another--another--another?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...expatriated Americans, even Henry James himself, have always seemed to me somewhat anchorless, rudderless, drifting before the ...wind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »