Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down pato...is which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar- room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the schem...e of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous c...urrent interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As this world is at present constituted, what we call the lower part of mankind work for pay, and by that means support themselves... and families; yet their assistance by the means of their labor is as necessary to the rich as the pay of the rich is to the laboring man. Did not this dependency for common subsistence oblige the lower class of men to sell their labor, if the gentleman whose birth and fortune had enabled him to have had a literate education was to despise his cook for his ignorance, the cook in my opinion would then have a very reasonable pretense for withdrawing his labor and forcing the learned insulter to employ some of that time in preparing food for his body which he (by the help of his cook) hath now leisure to employ in pampering the pride of his heart by first acquiring and then applauding his own acquired learning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero...; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must... remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the end, the fate of children depends on our ability to use technology constructively and carefully. The connection of children... and technology is not simply a matter of seat belts, safe toys, safe air, water and food, additive-free baby foods, or improved television programming. These are all important issues, but to stop here is to forget that today's children will soon be adults. Technological decisions made today will determine, perhaps irrevocably, the kind of physical and social world we bequeath them and the kind of people they become.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver's seat, it is our reluctan...ce, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, wh...en the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »