Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us in...capable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It used to be said in antislavery days that a people who would tacitly consent to the enslavement of 4,000,000 human beings were i...ncapable of being just to each other, and I believe this same rule holds with regard to the injustice practiced by men towards women. So long as all men conspire to rob women of the citizen's right to perfect equality in all the privileges and immunities of our so-called "free" government, we can not expect these same men to be capable of perfect justice to each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see ...but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Self-centeredness is a natural outgrowth of one of the toddler's major concerns: What is me and what is mine...? This is why most ...toddlers are incapable of sharing ... to a toddler, what's his is what he can get his hands on.... When something is taken away from him, he feels as though a piece of him--an integral piece--is being torn from him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate int...o it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract ideali...sm has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a go...od actor ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue ...is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self- government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, w...ho would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of t...rance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »