What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been em...ployed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements ... might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation;Mn...ot a superfluous grain of sand, for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part... inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord w...ith our attitude and our principles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of course, Behaviorism "works." So does torture. Give me a no- nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electr...ical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a vast advantage has a speech over a written composition. Men are imposed upon by voice and gesture, and by all that is condu...cive to enhance the performance. Any little prepossession in favor of the speaker raises their admiration, and then they do their best to comprehend him; they commend his performance before he has begun, but they soon fall off asleep, doze all the time he is preaching, and only wake to applaud him. An author has no such passionate admirers; his works are read at leisure in the country or in the solitude of the study; no public meetings are held to applaud him.... However excellent his book may be, it is read with the intention of finding it but middling; it is perused, discussed, and compared to other works; a book is not composed of transient sounds lost in the air and forgotten; what is printed remains.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for... lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and "retro" clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The elite artist knows that his audience views his art in a context of certain predispositions; he anticipates success or failure ...within a definable framework of theory and achievement. His audience is acutely aware of him as an individual, knowing that his primary concern is the interpretation of his individual experience, and that he is personally with the content and technique of his product. The popular artist, however, works under no such set of rules, with a much less predictable audience, and for much less predictable rewards. His relationship with his public is neither direct nor critical, for between him and his audience stand editors, publishers, sponsors, directors, public relations men, wholesalers, exhibitors, merchants, and others who can and often do influence his product.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most foreign and picturesque structures on the Cape, to an inlander, not excepting the salt-works, are the windmills,--gray- l...ooking, octagonal towers, with long timbers slanting to the ground in the rear, and there resting on a cart-wheel, by which their fans are turned round to face the wind.... They looked loose and slightly locomotive, like huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg, and reminded one of pictures of the Netherlands. Being on elevated ground, and high in themselves, they serve as landmarks,--for there are no tall trees, or other objects commonly, which can be seen at a distance in the horizon; though the outline of the land itself is so firm and distinct, that an insignificant cone, or even a precipice of sand, is visible at a great distance from over the sea. Sailors making the land commonly steer either by the windmills, or the meeting-houses. In the country, we are obliged to steer by the meeting-houses alone. Yet the meeting-house is a kind of windmill, which runs one day in seven, turned either by the winds of doctrine or public opinion, or more rarely by the winds of Heaven, where another sort of grist is ground, of which, if it be not all bran or musty, if it be not plaster, we trust to make the bread of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »