Adolescents may be, almost simultaneously, overconfident and riddled with fear. They are afraid of their overpowering feelings, of... losing control, of helplessness, of failure. Sometimes they act bold, to counteract their imperious yearnings to remain children. They are impulsive, impetuous, moody, disagreeable, overdemanding, underappreciative. If you don't understand them, remember, they don't understand themselves most of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The time is coming when all men will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but... a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is i...nstructed in what is set above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from o...ne end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And what was the theory at the bottom of all these astounding proceedings? So far as it can be reduced to comprehensible terms it ...was much less a theory than a fear--a shivering, idiotic, discreditable fear of a mere banshee--an overpowering, paralyzing dread that some extra-eloquent Red, permitted to emit his balderdash unwhipped, might eventually convert a couple of courageous men, and that the courageous men, filled with indignation against the plutocracy, might take to the highroad, burn down a nail-factory or two, and slit the throat of some virtuous profiteer. In order to lay his fear, in order to ease the jangled nerves of the American successors to the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, all the constitutional guarantees of the citizen were suspended, the statute-books were burdened with laws that surpass anything heard of in the Austria of Maria Theresa, the country was handed over to a frenzied mob of detectives, informers and agents provocateursand the Reds departed laughing loudly, and were hailed by the Bolsheviki as innocents escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... only a controlled fertility in human beings can maintain any progress. No system of society depending for its continuation on ...intelligent humans can stand long unless it encourages the control of the birth rate and includes contraceptive knowledge as a right. Without it no system, no matter what its ideals, can withstand the overpowering force of uncontrolled, unrestricted fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »