We have the pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of greatness. Ours are more natural and all the more solid and s...ure for being humbler. Since we will not do so out of conscience, at least out of ambition let us reject ambition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains t...o learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits--inasmuch as these two species always exist--occupy themselves with a vision of ...the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can grouse about the food, and the C.O. and anything I blame please. And that's more than you with your Gestapo and your storm t...roopers and your Aryan bourgeois. Ahhh, nuts. What's the good of talking to you. You can't even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When first my lines of heavenly joys made mention, Such was their luster, they did so excel,... That I sought out quaint words and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense as if it were to sell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Negro has no name. He is Cuffy Douglas or Cuffy Brooks, just whose Cuffy he may chance to be. The Woman has no name. She is Mr...s. Richard Roe or Mrs. John Doe, just whose Mrs. she may chance to be. Cuffy has no right to his earnings; he can not buy or sell, or lay up. Mrs. Roe has no right to her earnings; she can neither buy nor sell, make contracts, nor lay up anything that she can call her own. Cuffy has no right to his children; they can be sold from him at any time. Mrs. Roe has no right to her children; they may be bound out to cancel a father's debt of honor. The unborn child, even by the last will of the father, may be placed under the guardianship of a stranger and a foreigner. Cuffy has no legal existence; he is subject to restraint and moderate chastisement. Mrs. Roe has no legal existence; she has not the best right to her own person. The husband has the power to restrain, and administer moderate chastisement.... The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The Negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man. The few social privileges which the man gives the woman, he makes up to the (free) Negro in civil rights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. ...The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So, we'll go no more a-roving So late into the night,... Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast. And the heart must pause to breathe And love itself have rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and ...wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... married women work and neglect their children because the duties of the homemaker become so depreciated that women feel compel...led to take a job in order to hold the respect of the community. It is one thing if women work, as many of them must, to help support the family. It is quite another thing--it is destructive of woman's freedom--if society forces her out of the home and into the labor market in order that she may respect herself and gain the respect of others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »