The procedure of the novel is to individualize. As with other art forms, what it has to say that is of collective value is said by... inference from individual concrete things. History, on the other hand, proceeds by generalization. It treats people as groups; and when individuals appear they appear as catalysts of large collective actions or as representatives of groups, their significance being that of the group forces, the collection, the sum. This is a difference of convention, and on the conventions of an art depends its special expressiveness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The treatment of the incident of the assault upon the sailors of the Baltimore is so conciliatory and friendly that I am of the op...inion that there is a good prospect that the differences growing out of that serious affair can now be adjusted upon terms satisfactory to this Government by the usual methods and without special powers from Congress.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These are bad days for all of us who remember always that when real world forces come into conflict, the final result is never as ...dark as we mortals guess it in very difficult days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He's leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German touri...sts are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf's and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against en...emies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, withou...t in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and t...alked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he neve...r made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting t...ogether in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The old guard may grumble and occasionally sue, but in a society where Portnoy's Complaint is a record-breaking best- seller sexua...l permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve-ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »