The words "classic" and "romantic," like many other critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood them too v...aguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in the history of art and literature.... The term "classical," fixed, as it is, to a well-defined group in art, is clear, indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard, and merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it--people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus of old Greece and Rome, only because they fancy her grown into something staid and tame. And as the term "classical" has been used in a too absolute, and therefore in a misleading sense, so the term "romantic" has been used much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in which Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange adventure, and sought it in the Middle Ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Roosevelt, this is my principal request--it is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you leave the pres...idential chair, recommend Congress to submit to the Legislatures a Constitutional Amendment which will enfranchise women, and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without doing this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The blood of Abraham, God's father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has bee...n spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God--an anguished cry for peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts--especially texts by black women. A working-class Jew...ish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am heartily tired of this life of bondage, responsibility, and toil. I wish it was at an end.... We are both physically very hea...lthy.... Our tempers are cheerful. We are social and popular. But it is one of our greatest comforts that the pledge not to take a second term relieves us from considering it. That was a lucky thing. It is a reform--or rather a precedent for a reform, which will be valuable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them serio...usly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During medieval times, all those emotions were missing which have made us cautious and tentative in matters of justice: the insigh...t into diminished capacity, the concept of judicial fallibility, the awareness that society has to share in the blame for the guilt of individuals, the question whether an individual ought not be rehabilitated rather than made to suffer. Or, perhaps, better stated: a vague sense of all this is not lacking, but rather concentrates itself, unverbalized, in instant impulses of charity and forgiveness, unconcerned with the issue of guilt, which could suddenly break through the cruel satisfaction over the administration of justice. While we administer a hesitant, toned down justice, partially filled with a guilty conscience, the Middle Ages knew only two extremes: the full measure of cruel punishment or mercy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »