Building up a family's fortune is like moving earth with a needle, but losing a family's fortune can be as swift as a boat rushing... downstream with the current.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to ...(the square root of 300), or about seventeen years and a half, when--that is, in 1917Mit would pass into another or Ethereal Phase, which, for half a century, science has been promising, and which would last only (the square root of 17.5), or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the t...est of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in th...e memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman's adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self.... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: th...is is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of "style." But while style--deriving from... the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets--suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede... something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this--as in other ways--they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings... record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »