The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.... Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous prov...ocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thanks to our good old Constitution, and organization under it.... [The country] only needs that every right thinking man, shall g...o to the polls, and without fear or prejudice, vote as he thinks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing. . . . Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficul...t part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, "I told you so."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the only way in which Mr. Brooke could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well plied ...with them till they took up all the room in his brain. But here there was the difficulty of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand. Mr. Brooke himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way when he was speaking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degener...ate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every so often, I turn on the television and see one of the movement leaders being asked some idiot question like, "Isn't the wome...n's movement in favor of all women abandoning their children and going off to work?" ... the leader usually replies that the movement isn't in favor of all women doing anything right; what the movement is about, she says, is options. She is right, of course. At its best, that is exactly what the movement is about. But it just doesn't work out that way. Because the hardest thing for us to accept is the right to those options. I hear myself saying these words: what this movement is about is options. I say it to my friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I am really thinking is, if you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have watched ... many literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen come... and go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real. The day will come when men will see the UN and what it means clear...ly. Everything will be all right--you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction, and see it as a drawing they made themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its ...right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »