Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still "globaloney." Mr. Wallace's warp of sense... and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are both... forms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our good schools today are much better than the best schools of yesterday. When I was your age and a pupil in school, our teachers... were our enemies. Can any thing ... be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relator or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting... up with people, being able to stand things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should... be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The drama of the assassination has enlarged the personalities of both men, so it is as if each of them could have saved us from th...e troubled history that followed their deaths. Had Lincoln lived, many historians believe, his generous spirit would have labored in peace, as mightily as it had in war, to heal the nation's wounds, and perhaps much of America's tortured post-Civil War history would have been different. After Lincoln's death, a profound despair seized the nation, along with a deep bitterness that lasted for years, but America endured and the process of nation-building went on. Had John F. Kennedy lived, Robert Kennedy once told a reporter, the 1960s would have been different because he would have listened more sensitively to the young. It is somehow reassuring that even in the desperate hours after each assassination, a shaken nation, gripped with near-panic, gathered its will, looked to its Constitution, and reasserted political order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We were the daughters of the post-World War II American dream, the daughters of those idealized fifties sitcom families in which f...ather knew best and mother knew her place and a kind of disappointment, and tense, unspoken sexuality rattled around like ice cubes in their nightly cocktails.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part ...of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him.... For the most part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gauntlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who, "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and the very last sieveful of news,--what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer,--I was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We me...et at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory,--never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, n...either shall they learn war any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »