The Civil War divided a nation, whereas the American Revolution created and unified it. The Civil War exposed our vilest flaws, wh...ereas the Revolution shaped our character and (we generally assumed) displayed our courage, principles, and highmindedness for all the world to see. What happened in 1776 somehow reflected glory upon us, whereas what happened in 1861, when the polity disintegrated, became an object lesson in the perils of extremism and selfishness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman ef...fort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most men have not had much incentive to "add on" to their skills a talent for love. They already have cultural status and power, t...he trade-off for being relative strangers to their children. And in view of the object lesson of working mothers' struggles, it's a trade-off they are loath to relinquish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Dada object reflected an ironic posture before the consecrated forms of art. The surrealist object differs significantly in th...is respect. It stands for a mysterious relationship with the outer world established by man's sensibility in a way that involves concrete forms in projecting the artist's inner model.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Treating 'water' as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality ...of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anger is always concerned with individuals, ... whereas hatred is directed also against classes: we all hate any thief and any inf...ormer. Moreover, anger can be cured by time; but hatred cannot. The one aims at giving pain to its object, the other at doing him harm; the angry man wants his victim to feel; the hater does not mind whether they feel or not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to b...ecome a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject... of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »