The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the cons...titution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension. Dissent (which come from the Latin, dis and sentire) means originall...y to feel apart from others. People who disagree have an argument, but people who dissent have a quarrel. People may disagree and both may count themselves in the majority. But a person who dissents is by definition in a minority. A liberal society thrives on disagreement but is killed by dissension. Disagreement is the life blood of democracy, dissension is its cancer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a wonderful, but neglected precision in these words. The old English noun "travel" (in the sense of a journey) was origin...ally the same word as "travail" (meaning "trouble," "work," or "torment").... Significantly, too, the word "tour" in "tourist" was derived by back-formation from the Latin "tornus," which in turn came from the Greek word for a tool describing a circle. The traveler, then was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If originally it was not good for a man to be alone, it is much worse for a sick man to be so; he thinks too much of his distemper..., and magnifies it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality an...d spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. M...arriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By Jesus's time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmer...s, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sick-bed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about: his authority must not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance: "It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns", this is taken to mean: "It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »