Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unflecked with... anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position... in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After decades of unappreciated drudgery, American women just don't do housework any more--that is, beyond the minimum that is requ...ired in order to clear a path from the bedroom to the front door so they can get off to work in the mourning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of ...behavior which are valid according to the system's ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies for...eseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the fir...st case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Back from that great-grandfather I have come to puzzle a bending gravestone for his sake,... to question this diminishing and feed a minimum of children their careful slice of suburban cake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to red...uce this period to a minimum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that this planet is just barely habita...ble. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long. The disposition of its water and earth is distinctly unfortunate (the existence of the Mediterranean Sea in the place where we find it is perhaps the unhappiest accident in the whole firmament). These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet, which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »