Why don't you take a good look at yourself! What do you see?! A doctor, a scientist, a businessman? You see a scar-faced ex- con, ...a two-bit safecracker, a petty thief who don't know when he made the big time. Where do you come off to blast her! No matter what she's been, what she's done. She's a giant! And you wanna know why? Well, I'll tell ya. Because she sees something in you worth saving. If only one tenth of one percent of all the good in her could rub off on you, you'd be a giant too! But you're a midget! In your head, in your heart, in your whole makeup! You're a midget!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He's got a fifteen percent metabolism with an overactive thyroid and a glandular affectation of about three percent. With a one pe...rcent mentality. He's what we designate as the Crummy Moronic type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens, a substantial part of its whole population, who at this very moment are den...ied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think that if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever th...ey wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mother may be doing ninety percent of the disciplining, but the father still must have a full-time acceptance of all the child...ren. He never must say, "Get these kids out of here; I'm trying to watch TV." If he ever does start saying this, he is liable to see one of his kids on the six o'clock news.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes the race analogy complicated is that gays, as demographic composites, do indeed "have it better" than blacks--and yet i...n many ways contemporary homophobia is more virulent than contemporary racism. According to one monitoring group, one in four gay men has been physically assaulted as a result of his perceived sexual orientation; about fifty percent have been threatened with violence. (For lesbians, the incidence is lower but still disturbing.) A moral consensus now exists in this country that discriminating against blacks as teachers, priests, or tenants is simply wrong. (That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.) For much of the country, however, the moral legitimacy of homosexuals, remains very much in question.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Age affects how people experience time. The observations on this are well known, so it is only necessary to outline briefly what h...as been the experience of everyone I have ever talked to or read about: the years go faster as one gets older. At the age of four or six, a year seems interminable; at sixty, the years begin to blend and are frequently hard to separate from each other because they move so fast! There are, of course, a number of common-sense explanations for this sort of thing. If you have only lived five years, a year represents 20 percent of your life; if you have lived fifty years, that same year represents only 2 percent of your life, and since lives are lived as wholes, this logarithmic element would make it difficult to maintain the same perspective on the experience of a year's passage throughout a lifetime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Too-broad questions, such as, "What's on your mind?" are apt to be answered "nothing" nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be c...areful of slipping into ""psycho-speak," however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you're reading a script from the latest child-psychology text.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nationalism ... is the worship of the collective power of a local human community. Unlike the faith in progress through science, n...ationalism is not a new religion; it is a revival of an old one. This was the religion of the city-states of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. It was resuscitated in the West at the Renaissance, and this resuscitation of the Greco-Roman political religion has been far more effective than the resuscitation of the Greco-Roman style of literature, visual art, and architecture. Modern Western nationalism, inspired by Greco-Roman political ideals and institutions, has inherited the dynamism and fanaticism of Christianity. Translated into practice in the American and French Revolutions, it proved to be highly infectious. Today, fanatical nationalism is perhaps 90 percent of the religion of perhaps 90 percent of mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »