When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the midd...le and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The news spread like wildfire among us youths, when formerly, once in a year or two, one of these boats came up the Concord River,... and was seen stealing mysteriously through the meadows and past the village. It came and departed as silently as a cloud, without noise or dust, and was witnessed by few. One summer day this huge traveler might be seen moored at some meadow's wharf, and another summer day it was not there. Where precisely it came from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we who bathed there, we could never tell. We knew some river's bay only, but they took rivers from end to end. They were a sort of fabulous rivermen to us. It was inconceivable by what sort of mediation any mere landsman could hold communication with them. Would they heave to, to gratify his wishes? No, it was favor enough to know faintly of their destination, or the time of their possible return.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With two thousand years of Christianity behind him ... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the dee...p end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a... calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the suppo...rt of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman ef...fort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »