Witness the American ideal: the Self-Made Man. But there is no such person. If we can stand on our own two feet, it is because oth...ers have raised us up. If, as adults, we can lay claim to competence and compassion, it only means that other human beings have been willing and enabled to commit their competence and compassion to us--through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, right up to this very moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim to... all his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions ... extends so far, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chippenhook was the home of Judge Theophilus Harrington, known for his trenchant reply to an irate slave-owner in a runaway slave ...case. Judge Harrington declared that the owner's claim to the slave was defective. The owner indignantly demanded to know what was lacking in his legally sound claim. The Judge exploded, 'A bill of sale, sir, from God Almighty!'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not bedding, but a "relationship," is what women seek. And in this difference it is impossible to fail to acknowledge a distinct s...uperiority of the feminine sensibility, however cantish this may sound. Whereas men are overwhelmed by the strong pulsations of the body, women remain free to bestow a wider meaning to the corporeal elements of the erotic. The erotic does not end in spastic contractions and reflex discharges; it transcends them, to reach into the ethereal realms of memory and feeling, like a note that reverberates long after the string has pulsated. Woman may resort to her body in ways congruous with her aims and in a fashion is apt to be ranked as "manipulative." But only when she is long remembered and continually desired, as if by a cyclically renewed, ever kindled thirst; only when her image fills to capacity the consciousness of the man she has chosen, and stretches temporally beyond the meager boundaries of physiologic immediacy; only then does she claim to have won. When her immanent presence projects across time and space to leave a profound impress on another being: then she has "scored."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
President Kennedy had a wholesome, widely discussed, and largely deserved reputation for his interest in women.... But no Presiden...t, however young and energetic, could possibly have gotten around to all the ladies in Washington, New York, and Hollywood who made claim to his affections after he died.... Such was the force of Jack Kennedy and the manner of his death that anyone associated with him, even the pretenders, assumed added glamour and interest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some day I'll claim to you how all used up I am because of you but in the meantime the ride... Continues. Everyone is along for the ride, It seems. Besides, what else is there?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than... the metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The acceptance of a theory as true does involve a personal choice in a way that a law does not. Different people do differ about t...heories; they can choose whether or no they will believe them; but people do not differ about laws; there is no personal choice; universal agreement can be forced. Again, if we look at the history of science, we shall find that the great advances in theory are more closely connected with the names of the great men than are the advances in law. Every important theory is associated with some man whose scientific work was notable apart from that theory; either he invented other important theories or in some way he did scientific work greatly above the average. On the other hand there are a good many well-known laws which are associated with the names of men who, apart from those particular laws, are practically unknown; they discovered one important law, but they have no claim to rank among the geniuses of science. That fact seems to indicate that a greater degree of genius is needed to invent true theories than to discover true laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of cons...ent and not of rebellion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than ...the biological. They have forgotten their roots.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »