In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learn...ing and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry... "There!" and it is gone forever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded by them by the inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their orbit--their contemporaries. Their path is one of change and movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect today is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax, their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He does not create his object in reality as does the painter, but he creates, before the camera begins to function, the irrevocabl...y ultimate aesthetic form. He carries the notion of the shape of an object in himself and he takes the object destined for that form, giving it a certain position or moving it into a certain situation of light, in a certain relation to space.... The photographer's artistic performance is thus displayed in pre-photographic and in post-photographic action; in the preparation for real photographic action and in the reproduction of the photograph. The painter recreates his object from beginning to end ... through his activity, through his painting. The photographer, it is true, changes his object, too, by his photographic action ... he gives the convincing shape, most clearly adequate to his perception, before, and he fixes this shape in a mechanistic way.... Whereas the painter remains creative from first to last, the creative activity of the photographer is confined and limited; whereas the artistic action of the painter is not interrupted, the artistic action of the photographer breaks off in the moment in which the apparatus is to fix and make visible its effect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own wo...rks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One reason--perhaps the chief--of the virility of the Roosevelts is [their] very democratic spirit. They have never felt that beca...use they were born in a good position they could put their hands in their pockets and succeed. They have felt, rather, that being born in a good position, there is no excuse for them if they did not do their duty by the community.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What worries me, especially, is that public opinion over here is patting itself on the back every morning and thanking God for the... Atlantic Ocean (and the Pacific Ocean). We greatly underestimate the serious implications to our own future.... Things move with such terrific speed these days, that it is really essential to us to think in broader terms and, in effect, to warn the American people that they, too, should think of possible ultimate results in Europe and the Far East.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.... Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »