Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there ha...s not been, in all history, another age ... when so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm... nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since the beginning of time, three-quarters of the mental energy and of the lies inspired by vanity have been expended for their i...nferiors by people who are only abased by such expenditure. And Swann, who was easygoing and unaffected with a duchess, trembled at the thought of being scorned and put on airs when he was with a housemaid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Indian sat on the front seat, saying nothing to anybody, with a stolid expression of face, as if barely awake to what was goin...g on. Again I was struck by the peculiar vagueness of his replies when addressed in the stage, or at the taverns. He really never said anything on such occasions. He was merely stirred up, like a wild beast, and passively muttered some insignificant response. His answer, in such cases, was never the consequence of a positive mental energy, but vague as a puff of smoke, suggesting no responsibility, and if you considered it, you would find that you had got nothing out of him. This was instead of the conventional palaver and smartness of the white man, and equally profitable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both. Scientific materialism has merely introduced a... new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician malgré lui. Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels l...ike knowledge--and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern organic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to gove...rn this nation. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war," except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not... follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantation...s. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »