The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere ...in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue ...is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self- government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A requirement of femininity is that a woman devote her life to love--to mother love, to romantic love, to religious love, to amorp...hous, undifferentiated caring. The territory of the heart is admittedly a province that is open to all, but women alone are expected to make an obsessional career of its exploration, to find whatever adventure, power, fulfillment or tragedy life has to offer within its bounds. There is no question that a woman is apt to feel more feminine, more confident of her interior gender makeup, when she is reliably within some stage of love--even the girlish crush or the stage of unrequited love or a broken heart. Men have suffered for love, and men have accomplished great feats in the name of love, but what man has ever felt at the top of his masculine form when he is lovesick or suffering from heartache?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet ince...nse to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisf...ied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does... not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin--and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I... came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"... and now, pour la digestion, allow me to offer you a cigarette. Have no fear, at most this is only the one before last," he ad...ded wittily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For weeks or months they moved through their separate lives and slept side by side as though they were two strangers who had mista...kenly been assigned the same hotel room. And then something would happen and he would find himself staring at her as though he could see the soul of her, looking for an end to his troubles inside the loop of her arms, and he would be snagged with the fishhook of herself, with the barbed hook of his powerless infatuation with something that she seemed to have, some answer that she seemed to offer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that m...embers of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »