The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, fro...m which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in American... history is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women;Mit... requires a great many cultivated women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you have one Madame de Staël.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The years when we are parenting teenagers are the high point, the crest when everything seems to be in bright colors and in ten-fo...ot letters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised t...o a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-h...and manner.... Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another--cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagin...ed, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have no thoughts of our own: they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly cred...itable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome, for all I care.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Spacious Firmament on high, With all the blue Ethereal Sky,... And spangled Heav'ns, a Shining Frame, Their great Original proclaim: Th' unwearied Sun, from day to day, Does his Creator's Pow'r display, And publishes to every Land The Work of an Almighty Hand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted b...y audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator's lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »