Be a little careful of your Library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, Wh...at it will do with you? You will come here & get books that will open your eyes, & your ears, & your curiosity, & turn you inside out or outside in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kennedy benefited, too, from the fact that the country perceived him to be, like Roosevelt, a patrician. To be sure, Kennedy did n...ot boast a seventeenth-century lineage or descend from the landed gentry. Yet in other respects they were similar. Both had gone to prestigious prep schools; both were Harvard men; both had sailed the New England coast; each had a sense of noblesse oblige. Like Roosevelt, Kennedy was a man of inherited wealth who could, to a degree, view business from the outside. In comparing Kennedy to Roosevelt, a columnist for the New Republic observed: "Each had an upper-class education, found a life of public service more attractive than money-grabbing, and each had a respect for the decencies. At heart, too, each had a kind of patrician reticence, an impervious private dignity."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken in...to it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailor's Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is,... What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An older child, one who possesses a conscience, will be troubled with self-reproaches and feelings of shame for his naughtiness, e...ven if he is not discovered. But our two-year-olds and our three-year- olds experience guilt feelings only when they feel or anticipate disapproval from the outside. In doing this, they have taken the first steps toward the goal of conscience, but there is a long way ahead before the policeman outside becomes the policeman inside.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from out...side. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We find we breathe again, and hear the surgeon hum. Outside, in the street, a car starts up. The heart regularly... Thunders.--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
(I remember my mother, my mother, A stiff wind halted outside,... In the hard ear my country Was a far shore crying With invisible seas.)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Untidy is perhaps too mild a word; slut would be a better one. Being a slut is of course partly a matter of bad luck as well as ba...d management: things just do boil over oftener, fuses blow sooner, front doors bang leaving us outside in our dressing-gowns; but it goes deeper than bad luck. We are not actually incapable of cleaning our homes: but we are liable to reorganize instead of scrub; we do our cleaning in a series of periodic assaults. A mother-in- law has only to appear over the horizon and we act like the murderer in a Ray Bradbury story who kept on wiping the finger prints off the fruit at the bottom of the bowl. We work in a frenzy; but ... the frenzy usually subsides before we have got everything back into the cupboards again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[On Harvard President Charles William Eliot's lamentation that the average Harvard graduate had fewer than two children:] That is ...quite enough. Harvard graduates do not always make the best fathers. Why should we be agitated over the too small families of the rich when there are so many children of the poor that are not cared for? The rich should make it their duty to raise up these children to a higher standard.... Men of the world hate to give up their tobacco, liquor, sports, clubs, their luxurious habits, their freedom from responsibility. They prefer to flock together and so women are compelled to do the same. President Eliot talks as though the young women were sitting around anxiously and aimlessly waiting for the graduates to come and get them. He would find, if he should make the proper investigation, that a class of women is being developed who are demanding a higher standard of morals in men than did those of past generations, and if they cannot get husbands who reach this standard they are making very satisfactory careers for themselves outside of marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »