Nothing in medieval dress distinguished the child from the adult. In the seventeenth century, however, the child, or at least the ...child of quality, whether noble or middle-class, ceased to be dressed like the grown-up. This is the essential point: henceforth he had an outfit reserved for his age group, which set him apart from the adults. These can be seen from the first glance at any of the numerous child portraits painted at the beginning of the seventeenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape... into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony--this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of h...imself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote.... The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, ...hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for info...rmation about areas of life we don't know--Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel--the quality of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... many American Jews have a morbid tendency to exaggerate their handicaps and difficulties. ... There is no doubt that the Jew ...... has to be twice as good as the average non- Jew to succeed in many a field of endeavor. But to dwell upon these injustices to the point of self-pity is to weaken the personality unnecessarily. Every human being has handicaps of one sort or another. The brave individual accepts them and by accepting conquers them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ideals possess the strange quality that if they were completely realized they would turn into nonsense. One could easily follow a ...commandment such as "Thou shalt not kill" to the point of dying of starvation; and I might establish the formula that for the proper functioning of the mesh of our ideals, as in the case of a strainer, the holes are just as important as the mesh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sobe...r one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and sh...aved it down till the average is three and a half.... I never write "metropolis" for seven cents, because I can get the same money for "city." I never write "policeman," because I can get the same price for "cop." ... I never write "valetudinarian" at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »