The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first... half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, o...ur cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But long before Kate and Ultra Slimfast came along, hanging over the lives of every little girl born in the second half of the 20t...h century was the impossibly curvy shadow (40-18-32 in life-size terms) of Barbie. That preposterous physique, we learn as kids, is what a woman looks like with her clothes off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...women were fighting for limited freedom, the vote and more education. I wanted all the freedom, all the opportunity, all the eq...uality there was in the world. I wanted to belong to the human race, not to a ladies' aid society to the human race.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
First Let the rockets flash and the cannon thunder,... This child is a marvel, a matchless wonder. A staggering child, a child astounding, Dazzling, diaperless, dumfounding, Stupendous, miraculous, unsurpassed, A child to stagger and flabbergast, Bright as a button, sharp as a thorn, And the only perfect one ever born. Second Arrived this evening at half-past nine. Everybody is doing fine. Is it a boy, or quite the reverse? You can call in the morning and ask the nurse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But to consider this Subject in its most ridiculous Lights, Advertisements are of great Use to the Vulgar: First of all, as they a...re Instruments of Ambition. A Man that is by no Means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the Advertisements.... A Second Use which this Sort of Writings have been turned to of late Years, has been the Management of Controversy, insomuch that above half the Advertisements one meets with now-a-Days are purely Polemical.... The Third and last Use of these Writings is, to inform the World where they may be furnished with almost every Thing that is necessary for Life. If a Man has Pains in his Head, Cholicks in his Bowels, or Spots in his Clothes, he may here meet with proper Cures and Remedies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My general opinion about this doctrine is that it is a typically scholastic, view, attributable, first, to an obsession with a few... particular words, the uses of which are over- simplified, not really understood or carefully studied or correctly described; and second, to an obsession with a few (and nearly always the same) half-studied 'facts.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater an...d lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens--women, workers and the members of subject races--to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »