I am satisfied the present Chinese labor invasion (it is not in any proper sense immigration--women and children do not come) is p...ernicious and should be discouraged. Our experience in dealing with the weaker races--the negroes and Indians, for example--is not encouraging. We shall oppress the Chinamen, and their presence will make hoodlums and vagabonds of their oppressors. I therefore would consider with favor suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores. But I suspect that this bill is inconsistent with our treaty obligations.... If it violates the National faith, I must decline to sign it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had n...ot, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drif...t across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of su...ch varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The words "house" and "home" are a shorthand for two ways of thinking about the family, but it needs to be pointed out that they d...id not go through history as a pair. "House" is almost a dead word, used today only to refer to things grand and historical. People in the past did not use "home" in the emotionally loaded way we do. The Romance languages do not even have an equivalent word for "home" and have to call other words into service for expressing the modern concept.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you cd. do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public ...or half-educated ape of a clargimint cd. think he understood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify natur...ally, but at our pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer... be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »