Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they ...sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumera...ble presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civi...lizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its ...own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the Iliad noble heroes move inexorably, by way of a combination of choice and of forces beyond their control, toward destructio...n and dissolution. We are left with mourning, honour, endurance, and pity. In the Odyssey a somewhat dubiously heroic hero wins his way through various fantastical hazards by means of trickery and ingenuity. The Odyssey is not exclusive; it has room for travel, for rustics and servants, for low life, and for dastardly villains. Its overall movement is away from war and from barbarity towards prosperity and peace, cen tred on the wife and a happy domestic scene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think w...e mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype.... The separate languages of the Indo-European family were at one time, perhaps five thousand years ago, maybe much longer, a single language. The separation of the speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed by Darwin on various islands of the Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining enough resemblance to an original ancestor so that the family resemblance can still be seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, f...or its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a det...erminist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »