Why any quick-witted and sensitive person should feel ashamed of having said good-by to politics, he couldn't imagine. The sordid ...intrigues behind the scenes! The conscious or unconscious hypocrisy of every form of effective public speaking! The asinine stupidity of that interminable repetition of the same absurd over-simplifications, the same illogical arguments and vulgar personalities, the same bad history and baseless prophecy! And that was supposed to be a man's highest duty. And if he chose instead the life of a civilized human being, he ought to be ashamed of himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever gives advice to the sick gains a sense of superiority over them, no matter whether his advice is accepted or rejected. Tha...t is why sick people who are sensitive and proud hate their advisors even more than their illnesses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quintilian [educational writer in Rome about A.D. 100] hoped that teachers would be sensitive to individual differences of tempera...ment and ability. . . . Beating, he thought, was usually unnecessary. A teacher who had made the effort to understand his pupil's individual needs and character could probably dispense with it: "I will content myself with saying that children are helpless and easily victimized, and that therefore no one should be given unlimited power over them."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town... steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods... over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »