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 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 »
The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock... to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they... avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television enables voters to know their leaders far better than they did when newspapers were the primary source of political info...rmation. Television is more pitiless than the press because the moving image is more revealing than the printed word. In earlier times, as that old political stager Harold Macmillan has recalled, "the public character of any leading politician seldom bore any close relationship to his true nature. It was largely represented or distorted by party bias, by rumor, and above all by the Press.... The radio, and especially the television, allow the mass of the public to hear, see, and judge for themselves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »