Every reader of the French or German papers knows that not a day passes without producing some uneasy discussion of supposed socia...l decrepitude;Mfalling off of the birthrate;Mdecline of rural population;Mlowering of army standards;Mmultiplication of suicides;Mincrease of insanity or idiocy,--of cancer,--of tuberculosis;Msigns of nervous exhaustion,--of enfeebled vitality,--"habits" of alcoholism and drugs,--failure of eyesight in the young,--and so on, without end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,... does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We realize that we are laggards from the past century, still living in what Marx kindly calls 'the idiocy of rural life,' and we k...now that our rural life is like that of the past, not like that of much of the present.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight)... Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature wo...rks. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeed...s out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bourgeoisie ... has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egy...ptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.... The bourgeoisie ... draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization.... It has created enormous cities ... and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.... The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried ...down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a move...ment that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »