Historically speaking, the most obvious and most decisive distinction between the American and the French Revolutions was that the... historical inheritance of the American Revolution was "limited monarchy" and that of the French Revolution an absolutism which apparently reached far back into the first centuries of our era and the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all... other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Liberalism is too often misconceived as a new set of dogmas taught by a newer and better set of priests called "liberals." Liberal...ism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas--an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives.... Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs an...d moths that fret my leaves. Such a one has curculios, borers, knife-worms; a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or o...ther. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shall ...come later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plaus...ible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusi...on defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see--not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »