The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disap...pointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In... the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil..., or there is no existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were ...by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Babylon," exclaimed Rolf, who had to look down again and again at this net of shimmering strings of beads, this skein of light, t...his endless flowerbed of electric blossoms ... this labyrinth of rectangular windows threaded by gleaming canals, which is repeated over and over again with no change,... half order as though on a chessboard, half confusion, as though the Milky Way had fallen down from the sky ... a mosaic of colored fragments, but mobile, yet at the same time lifeless and cold as glass, then again the Bengal lights of a stage witches' sabbath,... an orgy of discord, of harmony, an orgy of the everyday, technological and mercantile above all; you immediately think of the Arabian Nights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The matrix is God?" "In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate ... to say that the matrix has a God, since... this being's omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix." "If it has limits, it isn't omnipotent." "Exactly.... Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Basically the cleavage between the two cities is of the simplest: Dallas is where the east ends, and Fort Worth is notoriously "wh...ere the west begins." Dallas is a baby Manhattan; Fort Worth is a cattle annex. Dallas has the suave and glittering clothes of Neiman Marcus; Fort Worth has dust and stockyards. For this a perfectly good historical reason exists. The Texas and Pacific Railway, reaching Dallas from the east in 1872, stopped there; the line was not pushed the few miles westward to Fort Worth till 1876. And in the intervening years dozens of big eastern firms--mercantile establishments, distributors, and the like--got nicely settled in Dallas, and have stayed there ever since. Dallas was the end of the line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An action is an aim of the subject, and it is his agency too which executes this aim: unless the subject were in this way even in ...the most disinterested action, i.e. unless he had an interest in it, there would be no action at all.... Impulse and passion are the very life- blood of all action: they are needed if the agent is really to be in his aim and the execution thereof. The morality concerns the content of the aim, which as such is the universal, an inactive thing, that finds it actualizing in the agent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hamilton took as his major premise the evil nature of man and followed with the consequent need for an authoritative government in... the hands of the propertied, who had a "stake in society" and therefore had most to gain or lose by government; Jefferson argued that since man is naturally well-disposed toward his fellows, all that is necessary for a good society is sufficient training and opportunity to make all men realize that their own good derives from the common good. Hamilton believed the principal duty of government was to protect private property and the sanctity of contract; Jefferson saw it as promoting the general welfare over and above any consideration of wealth.... Hamilton saw American prosperity rising through industrial capitalism; Jefferson looked with suspicion and disfavor upon mercantile activity, found it enslaving, deceitful, predatory, and contrary to man's natural desire to live free and relatively self-sufficient by the fruit of his own labors. Instead of manufacturing, he placed his hopes in an agrarian economy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole of modern thought is steeped in science; it has made its way into the works of all our best poets, and even the mere man... of letters, who affects to ignore and despise science, is unconsciously impregnated with her spirit, and indebted for his best products to her methods. I believe that the greatest intellectual revolution mankind has yet seen is now slowly taking place by her agency. She is teaching the world that the ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment, and not authority; she is teaching it to estimate the value of evidence; she is creating a firm and living faith in the existence of immutable moral and physical laws, perfect obedience to which is the highest possible aim of a intelligent being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »