[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 »
The duties which a police officer owes to the state are of a most exacting nature. No one is compelled to choose the profession of... a police officer, but having chosen it, everyone is obliged to live up to the standard of its requirements. To join in that high enterprise means the surrender of much individual freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind n...or one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which seemeth to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity--namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources... of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom,--it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, b...ut universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Butte citizen's blood pressure rises and falls with the price of copper. He opposes war "and yet, when you come to think of it..., war would probably raise the price of copper and increase work and wages ..." Sometimes he is half-convinced that Butte is the real capital of the United States and copper instead of gold the proper standard of values. If he is a miner, or has friends or near relatives in the mines, he is often grim and worried. Butte's streets are crowded nightly with persons intent upon a round of pleasure in bars and gambling places, some seeking to forget the fears of daily existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w...ith the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no s...tandard of value whatever is intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it.... Man believes th...at the world itself is filled with beauty--he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world--alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a ...strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »