I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on the ...simple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang f...rom a boot-lace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of ...mathematics, of physics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have ...been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsib...ility ... a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his fore...st life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American distinction between the schlemiel and the schlimazl, summarized in the rule of thumb that says the former spills the ...soup, the latter is the one into whose lap it falls, provides a helpful basis for definition. The schlemiel is the active disseminator of bad luck, and the schlimazl its passive victim. Or, more sharply defined, the schlimazl happens upon mischance, he has a penchant for lucklessness, but the unhappy circumstances remain outside him, and always suggest the slapstick quality of surprise. The schlemiel's misfortune is his character. It is not accidental, but essential. Whereas comedy involving the schlimazl tends to be situational, the schlemiel's comedy is essential, deriving from his very nature in its confrontation with reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-cr...ests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short- term objects... of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »