Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city ... or those who choose to go to a front line, are obviously asking themselve...s to what extent they are cowards. But the tests they set themselves--there is a dead body, can you bear to look at it?--are nothing in comparison with the tests that are sprung on them. It is not the obvious tests that matter (do you go to pieces in a mortar attack?) but the unexpected ones (here is a man on the run, seeking your help--can you face him honestly?).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals--and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not... sure would ever feel this way--some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the first time I'm content to see What poor mortar and bricks... I have to build with, knowing that I can Never in seventy years be more a man Than now a sack of meal upon two sticks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror ...at the desecration of brick and mortar.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty- five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while h...e was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy center of Manhattan Island.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the ...walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »