There is evidence that all too many people are approaching parenthood with a dangerous lack of knowledge and skill. The result is ...that many children are losing out on what ought to be an undeniable right--the right to have parents who know how to be good parents, parents skilled in the art of "parenting."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bog...us enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All this stuff you heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, tr...aditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.... Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost--and will never lose--a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Did you ever hear the story about the fighter that was losing badly to the other guy? He's getting the hell kicked out of him and ...he comes back to his corner between rounds and his manager says, "Keep up the good work, kid, because the other guy isn't laying a glove on you." And the fighter says, "Then you'd better keep your eye on the referee because somebody is kicking the shit out of me."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Preschoolers think and talk in concrete, literal terms. When they hear a phrase such as "losing your temper," they may wonder wher...e the lost temper can be found. Other expressions they may hear in times of crisis--raising your voice, crying your eyes out, going to pieces, falling apart, picking on each other, you follow in your father's footsteps--may be perplexing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...the Holocaust has been like a fad, a rock group losing its original sound, a fashionable form of dress that outlives its popula...rity ... it has been commercialized, metaphored out of reality, glamorized, been severed from the historical fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Trying to love your children equally is a losing battle. Your children's scorecards will never match your own. No matter how metic...ulously you measure and mete out your love and attention, and material gifts, it will never feel truly equal to your children. . . . Your children will need different things at different times, and true equality won't really serve their different needs very well, anyway.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Trains are for meditation, for playing out long thought-processes, over and over; we trust them, perhaps because they have no choi...ce but to go where they are going. Nowadays, however, they smack of a dying gentility. To travel by car makes journeys less mysterious, too much a matter of the will. One might as easily sit on a sofa and imagine a passing landscape. I doubt whether any truly absorbing conversation ever took place in a car; they are good only for word games and long, tedious narratives. We have come to regard cars too much as appendages of our bodies and will probably pay for it in the end by losing the use of our legs. We owe to them the cluttering of the landscape, the breakup of villages and towns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This American government,--what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity..., but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we all must allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished. For government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most left alone by it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »