When in the enfranchisement of the black men [women] saw another ignorant class of voters placed about their heads, and beheld the... danger of a distinctively "male" government, forever involving the nations of the earth in war and violence; and demanded for the protection of themselves and children, that woman's voice should be heard and her opinions in public affairs be expressed by the ballot, they were coolly told that the black man had earned the right to vote, that he had fought and bled and died for his country. It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth, "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul--enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final reven...ge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
International relations is security, it's trade relations, it's power games. It's not good-and-bad. But what I saw in Yugoslavia w...as pure evil. Not ethnic hatred--that's only like a label. I really had a feeling there that I am observing unleashed human evil ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power o...f expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not be strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hawthorne--like Poe--became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as E...merson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the "tale," was really a convert to aesthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of "grotesques and arabesques" who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt. Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a ...few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I.I.I.I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw lov...e as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
and men strive with each other not for power or the accumulation of paper but in joy create for others the house, the poem, t...he game of athletic beauty.
Then washed in the brightness of the vision, I saw how in its radiance would grow and be nourished and suddenly burst into terrible and splendid bloom the blood-red flower of revolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »