Any campaign--like any good drama--will have its stylized performances. So too will it have one final dramatic element--a plot. Th...e classic unfolding story of any drama involves an introduction, rising action, turning point, falling action, and conclusion. A presidential campaign has all of these essentials--an introduction in the way of speculation about candidates "available" for party nominations; rising action in the form of early organizational efforts, qualifying for public funding, formal announcements, etc.; turning points in the multitude of caucuses and primaries leading to party conventions and nominations; falling action (spiced with unexpected events) in the general election campaign; and a conclusion on election day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragic or comic plot is not a straight line: it is a parabola following the shapes of the mouths on the conventional masks. Come...dy has a U-shaped plot, with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending. Tragedy has an inverted U, with the action rising in crisis to a peripety and then plunging downward to a catastrophe through a series of recognitions, usually of the inevitable consequences of previous acts. But in both cases what is recognized is seldom anything new; it is something which has been there all along, and which, by its reappearance or manifestation, brings the end into line with the beginning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conscience ... lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure being. It lives in drea...d of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being.... Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called 'beautiful soul,' its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the... action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home--so close and so small that they cannot be seen ...on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Vietnam, some of us lost control of our lives. I want my life back. I almost feel like I've been missing in action for twenty-t...wo years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »