Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the la...bors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the... memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While you're playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entire...ly dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English public are not yet ripe to comprehend the essential difference between the reason and the understanding,--between a pr...inciple and a maxim--an eternal truth and a mere conclusion from a generalization of a great number of facts.... Suppose Adam watching the sun sinking under the horizon for the first time; he is seized with gloom and terror, relieved with scarce a ray of hope of ever seeing the glorious light again. The next evening when it declines, his hopes are stronger but mixed with fear, and even at the end of 1000 years, all that a man can feel, is hope and an expectation so strong as to preclude anxiety. Compare this in its highest degree with the assurance which you have that the two sides of any triangle are greater than the third. This demonstrated of one triangle is seen to be eternally true of all imaginable triangles. This is the truth perceived at once by the reason, wholly independently of experience. It is and must ever be so, multiply and vary the shapes and sizes of triangles as you may.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under ...the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for its shape and comfort.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That three times five is equal to the half of thirty, expresses a relation between these numbers. Propositions of this kind are di...scoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is any where existent in the universe. Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truths, demonstrated by Euclid, would for ever retain their certainty and evidence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is because the public are a mass--inert, obtuse, and passive--that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can t...ell from their bear-like grunts where they are--and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has be...come Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... fain would I turn back the clock and devote to French or some other language the hours I spent upon algebra, geometry, and tri...gonometry, of which not one principle remains with me. Stay! There is one theorem painfully drummed into my head which seems to have inhabited some corner of my brain since that early time: "The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides!" There it sticks, but what of it, ye gods, what of it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »