It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one fee...ls all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:... Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have no thoughts of our own: they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly cred...itable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome, for all I care.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity--these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace ...of them. They hide nothing; they are not ashamed. Man, with his soiled mind, covers himself. He will not even enter a drawing room with his breast and back naked, so alive are he and his mates to indecent suggestion. Man is "The Animal That Laughs." But so does the monkey, as Mr. Darwin pointed out; and so does the Australian bird that is called the laughing jackass. No--Man is the Animal that Blushes. He is the only one that does it--or has occasion to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have often been asked to be fair and view a matter from all sides. I did so, hoping that something might improve if I viewed all... sides of it. But the result was the same. So I went back to viewing things only from one side, which saves me a lot of work and disappointment. For it is comforting to regard something as bad and to be able to use one's prejudice as an excuse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In looking back over the college careers of those who for various reasons have been prominent in undergraduate life ... one cannot... help noticing that these men have nearly always shown from the start an interest in the lives of their fellow students. A large acquaintance means that many persons are dependent on a man and conversely that he himself is dependent on many. Success necessarily means larger responsibilities, and responsibilities mean many friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambus...hed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American... life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »