Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The... new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of th...e law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the Wife of Hector, in Homer's Iliads [sic], discourses with her Husband about the Battel [sic] in which he was going to enga...ge, the Hero, desiring her to leave that Matter to his Care, bids her go to her Maids and mind her Spinning: By which the Poet intimates, that Men and Women ought to busie themselves in their proper Spheres, and on such Matters only as are suitable to their respective Sex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Faithful horoscope-watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets ...matters off to a spirited start.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political bei...ng.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see ...but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And no matter how all this disappeared, Or got where it was going, it is no longer... Material for a poem. Its subject Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad Comet screaming hate and disaster....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »