Stop it you fools. Stop it I said. I'm mad, good and mad.... I'm mad and who wouldn't be. You, Dunson pretendin' you're gonna kill... him. Why it's the last thing in the world you--Stay still. I'm mad, I told you. And you Matthew Garth, gettin' your face all beat up and all bloody. You oughta see, you oughta see how silly you look, like something the cat dragged--. Stay still. What a fool I've been. Expectin' trouble for days, when anybody with half a mind would know you two love each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, for some reason, you want to feel completely out of step with the rest of the world, the only thing to do is sit around a cock...tail lounge in the afternoon.... You sit around the gloom and have a few quiet, meditative drinks, get everything figured out. Then you go out and the sun hits you. And you feel like something that's been drinking in a gopher hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The resemblance between the two movements covers far more than the speed and extent of their conquests. It can be argued that in s...ome measure both are great Christian heresies. And like Communism, the Moslem faith in its relations with Europe has tended to follow the pattern of relentless pressure on all weak points and undefended frontiers and to advance its banners wherever there were found to be no defenders at the gate.... Islam derived its power to attract educated and intellectual groups from the use it made of ideas deeply congenial to the Oriental mind. Its rejection of the Greek and Christian heritage of humanism and incarnation in favor of a purely transcendent deity accorded well with the other-worldly tradition of Oriental religious thought. At the same time, the Moslem appeal to the people at large lay in the social evils which it promised to redress. Mohammedanism was in part a harking back to traditional intellectual and religious ideas, in part an outburst of social protest against an unjust and unstable social order. Modern Communism has something of the same character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every so often, I turn on the television and see one of the movement leaders being asked some idiot question like, "Isn't the wome...n's movement in favor of all women abandoning their children and going off to work?" ... the leader usually replies that the movement isn't in favor of all women doing anything right; what the movement is about, she says, is options. She is right, of course. At its best, that is exactly what the movement is about. But it just doesn't work out that way. Because the hardest thing for us to accept is the right to those options. I hear myself saying these words: what this movement is about is options. I say it to my friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I am really thinking is, if you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To beguile the time, Look like the time, bear welcome in your eye,... Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we eliminated the dog from our lives, nothing much would happen to our ecology. Independent of man, the dog is a vandal. With m...an, he does a little sheep-herding, a little watch-dogging. He helps law enforcement officers control the troublesome ghetto-dwellers and protest marchers. He sniffs out "hash" and "grass." He goes out on weekends and helps man murder other forms of life for pleasure. But mostly he is just an adjunct to man's ego.... The cat owes man nothing. Some experts estimate that there is one homeless cat managing on its own for every one with a home, which makes a total cat population in the U.S. of more than fifty million. That means the largest nonhuman animal population in the nation, short of rodents, whose number is beyond estimate. Eliminate cats from our ecology and, in a matter of weeks, we would be overrun by rodents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have to recognise, that the gin-palace, like many other evils, although a poisonous, is still a natural outgrowth of our social... conditions. The tap-room in many cases is the poor man's only parlour. Many a man takes to beer, not from the love of beer, but from a natural craving for the light, warmth, company, and comfort which is thrown in along with the beer, and which he cannot get excepting by buying beer. Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has... turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep the...m, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You've got to just stand there and take it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »