[On Harvard President Charles William Eliot's lamentation that the average Harvard graduate had fewer than two children:] That is ...quite enough. Harvard graduates do not always make the best fathers. Why should we be agitated over the too small families of the rich when there are so many children of the poor that are not cared for? The rich should make it their duty to raise up these children to a higher standard.... Men of the world hate to give up their tobacco, liquor, sports, clubs, their luxurious habits, their freedom from responsibility. They prefer to flock together and so women are compelled to do the same. President Eliot talks as though the young women were sitting around anxiously and aimlessly waiting for the graduates to come and get them. He would find, if he should make the proper investigation, that a class of women is being developed who are demanding a higher standard of morals in men than did those of past generations, and if they cannot get husbands who reach this standard they are making very satisfactory careers for themselves outside of marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... to be successful a person must attempt but one reform. By urging two, both are injured, as the average mind can grasp and assi...milate but one idea at a time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So I cradle this average violin that knows Only forgotten showtunes, but argues... The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape... into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony--this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating "Low Average Abili...ty," reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have... read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No doubt for the average man nationalism is no more than one of the faiths that live together in actual if illogical partnership i...n his heart and mind (illogical in the sense that some of these faiths, say Christianity and national patriotism, may have mutually incompatible ethical ideals). Yet it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which for many modern Western men the worship of the nation-state occupies a major part of their conscious relations with groups outside the family.... The ritual surrounding the flag, patriotic hymns, the reverent reading of patriotic texts, the glorification of national heroes (saints), the insistence on the nation's mission, the nation's basic consonance with the scheme of the universe--all of this is so familiar to most of us that unless we are internationalist crusaders in favor of a world-state or some other proposed means for securing universal peace we never even notice it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks fa...ster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The acceptance of a theory as true does involve a personal choice in a way that a law does not. Different people do differ about t...heories; they can choose whether or no they will believe them; but people do not differ about laws; there is no personal choice; universal agreement can be forced. Again, if we look at the history of science, we shall find that the great advances in theory are more closely connected with the names of the great men than are the advances in law. Every important theory is associated with some man whose scientific work was notable apart from that theory; either he invented other important theories or in some way he did scientific work greatly above the average. On the other hand there are a good many well-known laws which are associated with the names of men who, apart from those particular laws, are practically unknown; they discovered one important law, but they have no claim to rank among the geniuses of science. That fact seems to indicate that a greater degree of genius is needed to invent true theories than to discover true laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »