With the present wage conditions there are thousands of young women who are living in a state of semi-starvation and they are alwa...ys surrounded by the most terrible temptation. Oh, I know that some of [the] greatest reformers insist that a girl's virtue is not affected by under-nourishment, disease and nervous collapse; but if these well housed, well fed, well dressed people were put in a dirty, ugly room, if their clothes did not protect them from the cold, if their stomachs were never filled, would not even the staunchest lose some of her self-respect when looking forward to an old age? It is only a matter of wonder to me that so many girls keep clean and decent through it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of livin...g in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... that's what living happens to be ... the physiological denial of reverence and good manners and Christianity.... At your age o...ne's quite old enough to know what the essence of life really is. Shamelessness, that's all; pure shamelessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The plant is not a mere product of the soil, but a living process centred in itself, the essence of which has nothing to do with t...he character of the soil. In the same way the art-work must be regarded as a creative formation, freely making use of every precondition. Its meaning and its own individual particularity rests in itself, and not in its preconditions. In fact one might also describe it as a being that uses man and his personal dispositions merely as a cultural medium or soil, disposing his powers according to his own laws, while shaping itself to the fulfillment of its own creative purpose.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 »
The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from... it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was or where it led to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A new kind of woman with deep-rooted values is changing the way we live. Market researchers call it "neo-traditionalism." To us it...'s a woman who has found her identity in herself, her home, her family.... She is part of an extraordinary social movement that is profoundly changing the way Americans look at living--and the way products are marketed. The home is again the center of American life, oatmeal is back on the breakfast table, families are vacationing together, watching movies at home, playing Monopoly again. Even the perfume ads are suddenly glorifying commitment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »