While lying there listening to the Indians, I amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some prope...r name introduced. There can be no more startling evidence of their being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race than to hear this unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor understand. We may suspect change and deterioration in almost every other particular but the language which is so wholly unintelligible to us. It took me by surprise, though I had found so many arrowheads, and convinced me that the Indian was not the invention of historians and poets.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if... he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To suppose that "I know" is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. Even if... some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and much of it is still not so. utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it ("I do"): in other cases it functions, like tone and expression, or again like punctuation and mood, as an intimation that we are employing language in a special way ("I warn," "I ask," "I define"). Such phrases cannot, strictly, be lies, though they can "imply" lies, as "I promise" implies that I fully intend, which may be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In... the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realiti...es; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
OUR Latin books in motly row, Invite us to our task--... Gay Horace, stately Cicero: Yet there's one verb, when once we know, No higher skill we ask: This ranks all other lore above-- We've learned "'Amare' means 'to love'!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into th...e, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Others built beautifully and well, but fell... to lie like a bleached hull; other sea-cities have faltered and striven with the tide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The State has but one face for me: that of the police. To my eyes, all of the State's ministries have this single face, and I cann...ot imagine the ministry of culture other than as the police of culture, with its prefect and commissioners.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »