Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than u...pon the labours of cabinets and foreign offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning... her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mental health depends upon the maintenance of a balance within the personality between the basic human urges and egocentric wishes... on the one hand and the demands of conscience and society on the other hand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The strongest and most effective [force] in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of ... power is not violence in all the forms d...eployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing someth...ing foreign, something at odds with nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendant...s praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I now have next to no hope of a restoration of the old Union.... If it is the settled and final judgment of any slave State that s...he cannot live in the Union, I should not think it wise or desirable to retain her by force, even if it could be done. But am I, therefore, to oppose the war? If it were a war of conquest merely, certainly I should oppose it.... But the war is forced on us. We cannot escape it. While ... perhaps in all the cotton-growing States, a deciding and controlling public judgment has deliberately declared against remaining in the Union, it is quite certain that in several States rebellious citizens are bent on forcing out of the Union States whose people are not in favor of secession.... If force had been employed to meet force, I believe several States now out of the Union would have remained in it.... The war ... for the defence of the capital, for the maintenance of the authority of the Government and the rights of the United States, I think is necessary, wise, and just.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My course is a firm assertion and maintenance of the rights of the colored people of the South according to the Thirteenth, Fourte...enth, and Fifteenth Amendments, coupled with a readiness to recognize all Southern people, without regard to past political conduct, who will now go with me heartily and in good faith in support of these principles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »