I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that... there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Society' in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all the good, brave, unassuming men, betwe...en the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these has a free pass in every city and village, 'good for this generation only,' and it depends on each to make use of this pass or not as it may happen to suit his or her fancy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even a...ccepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cities are ... distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New Yo...rk is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no shadow of protection to be had by sheltering behind the slender stockades of visionary speculation, or by hiding behin...d the wagon-wheels of pacific theories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Draw up the dew. Swell with pacific violence. Take shape in silence. Grow as the clouds grew.... Beautiful brood the cornlands, and you are heavy; Leafy the boughs--they also hide big fruit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake ... but absolut...e personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxur...y of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »