Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools. This is the first step towards becomin...g either estimable or agreeable; and until it be taken there is no hope. The sooner the discovery is made the better, as there is more time and power for taking advantage of it. Sometimes the great truth is found out too late to apply to it any effectual remedy. Sometimes it is never found at all; and these form the desperate and inveterate causes of folly, self- conceit, and impertinence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What an infernal set of fools those schoolmarms must be! Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The s...ooner the present generation of women dies out, the better. We have idiots enough in the world now without such women propagating any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Vengeance upon the murderers," the cry goes up, "Vengeance for Jacques Molay." In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,... The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop, Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face, Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide For the embrace of nothing....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unfortunately the laughter of adults too often carries to the ears of the young the ring of ridicule, that annihilating enemy of h...uman dignity. Like grownups, children enjoy participating in a joke and appreciate admiration of their wit and cleverness, but do not enjoy being the butt of the jokesLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The smaller the person, the less we worry about his dignity. Sometimes we even find the idea a little ludicrous as if smallness an...d inexperience were incompatible with anything so majestic as human dignity....Yet children have a great sense of their own dignity. They couldn't define what it is but they know when it has been violated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are only two reasons why any child decides to give up something he wants to do or to do something he doesn't like. One is fe...ar, and punishment is the enforcer. The other is the wish to please someone important, and love is the enforcer. Normally in everyday life both find their place and necessarily so. The important question is which predominates and grows into the prime determiner of behavior. When it is fear, the outside rules and the power of their enforcement tell the story. When it is love, self-discipline builds the structure of consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I used to be angry all the time and I'd sit there weaving my anger. Now I'm not angry. I sit there hearing the sounds outside, the... sounds in the room, the sounds of the treadles and heddles--a music of my own making.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence in ...the possibility of certain knowledge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, ep...idemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma.... (We had to witness) wars ... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities ... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations).... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of ... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases ... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored...; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »