In New York--whose subway trains in particular have been "tattooed" with a brio and an energy to put our own rude practitioners to... shame--not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.... Even the most chronically dispossessed appear prepared to endorse the legitimacy of the "haves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though Americans talk a good deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who a...re serious. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world... is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good government cannot be found on the bargain-counter. We have seen samples of bargain-counter government in the past when low ta...x rates were secured by increasing the bonded debt for current expenses or refusing to keep our institutions up to the standard in repairs, extensions, equipment, and accommodations. I refuse, and the Republican Party refuses, to endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over... the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre- eminence without too precise a knowledge ...of what it consisted in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Comedy is an intellectual affair, and deals chiefly with logic. Tragedy is an emotional affair, and deals chiefly with value. Hora...ce Walpole once said that "life is a comedy to the man who thinks and a tragedy to the man who feels." Comedy is negative; it is a criticism of limitations and an unwillingness to accept them. Tragedy is positive; it is an uncritical acceptance of the positive content of that which is delimited. Since comedy deals with the limitations of actual situations and tragedy with their positive content, comedy must ridicule and tragedy must endorse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this wh...en I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »