They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not pl...ay so many games as they do in England, for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place to the former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the c...rest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by ...the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than ...forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most peo...ple in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Within the university ... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake o...f searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In abnormal times like our own, when institutions are changing rapidly in several directions at once and the traditional framework... of society has broken down, it becomes more and more difficult to measure any type of behavior against any other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to prod...uce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »