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 »
It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in th...e islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentimen...t in man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptib...ly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess ...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 »
What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, ...the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »