Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The... new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My profession brought me in contact with various minds. Earnest, serious discussion on the condition of woman enlivened my busines...s room; failures of banks, no dividends from railroads, defalcations of all kinds, public and private, widows and orphans and unmarried women beggared by the dishonesty, or the mismanagement of men, were fruitful sources of conversation; confidence in man as a protector was evidently losing ground, and women were beginning to see that they must protect themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, [onanism] has the least to recommend it. As an amusement it is too fleeting; as an... occupation it is too wearing; as a public exhibition there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long since been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence--among the best bred these two arts are now indulged only in private--though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo upon the fundamental sigh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include "Capital Lawes" providing a death penalty for any c...hild over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The last public hanging in the State took place in 1835 on Prince Hill.... On the fatal day, the victim, a man named Watkins, peer...ing through the iron bars of his cell, and seeing the townfolk scurrying to the place of execution, is said to have remarked, 'Why is everyone running? Nothing can happen until I get there.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the structure of our public morality crashed to earth. Above its grave a tombstone read, "Be tolerant--even of evil." Logicall...y the next step would be to say to our commonwealth's criminals, "I disagree that it's all right to rob and murder, but naturally I respect your opinion." Tolerance is only complacence when it makes no distinction between right and wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: "W...here was I before I was born." In the beginning was ... what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »