[Oliver North is a] document-shredding, Constitution-trashing, Commander in Chief-bashing, Congress-thrashing, uniform-shaming, Ay...atollah-loving, arms-dealing, criminal-protecting, résumé-enhancing, Noriega-coddling, Social Security-threatening, public school-denigrating, Swiss-banking-law-breaking, letter-faking, self-serving, election-losing, snake-oil salesman who can't tell the difference between the truth and a lie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nay, if there's room for poets in this world A little overgrown (I think there is),... Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's,--this live, throbbing age. That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have this very moment finished reading a novel called The Vicar of Wakefield [by Oliver Goldsmith].... It appears to me, to be i...mpossible any person could read this book through with a dry eye and yet, I don't much like it.... There is but very little story, the plot is thin, the incidents very rare, the sentiments uncommon, the vicar is contented, humble, pious, virtuous--but upon the whole the book has not at all satisfied my expectations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromw...ell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever else it may be--stimulus, tranquilizer, aural nipple, too of executives, Muzak is basically trivializing. It is not simpl...y that it relegates music to the province of wallpaper. Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself. Mozart was entirely amenable to such films as Elvira Madigan and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote aptly for The Invaders, Arnold Bax for Oliver Twist, Sergei Prokofiev for Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich for others. In such uses, music collaborates with artists, it becomes an art among arts. But Muzak collaborates chiefly with management: it is used as an aural smoke-screen, a form of jamming, a hormone in the henhouse, an emollient in cemeteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"A man," said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of ...opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although there have been witty big men--Oscar Wilde comes first to mind--wit and humor seem more in the province of the smaller ma...n. Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers were all small men. We expect a comedian to be small. He may also be fat. W.C. Fields was fat; so was Oliver Hardy. Fat is funny, small is funny. Lou Costello, of Abbot & Costello, was small and fat--a winning comic combination. Tall isn't funny, perhaps owing to its being too imposing, even slightly menacing. Tall and handsome conjoined are especially unfunny. One can always fall back on being the tall and silent type, of whom, in the movies, Gary Cooper was the apotheosis. But if one is small and silent, one is likely merely to be counted shy. Small men are under an obligation to do more talking; perhaps this is why so many of them are always joking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good ...copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have seen in this revolution a circular motion of the sovereign power through two usurpers, father and son, to the late King to ...this his son. For ... it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and then back again from Richard Cromwell to the Rump; then to the Long Parliament; and thence to King Charles, where long may it remain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »