If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bias, point of view, fury--are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours ...leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse t...o explore, a document to verify.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... my last work is no sooner on the stands than letters come, suggesting a subject. The grandmothers of strangers are crying from... the grave, it seems, for literary recognition; it is bewildering, the number of salty grandfathers, aunts and uncles that languish unappreciated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given ...trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret's nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »