What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminati...ng? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite unhypothetical assumption of aesthetic theory ("high ideals"), on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humour, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground. The very accent of the words "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" implies an instinctive perception that this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. For both are used in a derogatory sense. The "Highbrow" is the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept unpalatable virtue; while the "Lowbrow" is a good fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given moment ...in the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over seems to me to mean something like this: in any possible state of affairs in whi...ch kangaroos have no tails, and which resembles our actual state of affairs as much as kangaroos having no tails permits it to, the kangaroos topple over.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would ...be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature.... People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »