There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents,... each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a so...rt of insecurity which some find titillating. If a woman wears a high-heeled shoe it changes the apparent musculature of the leg so that you get an effect of twanging sinew, of tension needing to be released. Her bottom sticks out like an offering. At the same time, the lofty perch is an expression of vulnerability, she is effectively hobbled and unable to escape. There is something arousing about this declaration that she is prepared to sacrifice function for form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera len...s and the eye both register images--because of their sensitivity to light--at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes the computer's representation special is that it can be manipulated so rapidly without direct human intervention. Once ...the program is determined and the machine set to work, the electrons fly until an answer is produced. An abacus can produce an answer mechanically by means of a person who unthinkingly slides the counters according to the rules. And yet the very fact that a human being is needed to push the counters suggests a close link between man and machine. The abacus is a tool rather than a machine, for it extends human technical capabilities while remaining intimately under human control. A machine runs more or less under its own control, with its own sense of purpose and its own inanimate source of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to lin...k us today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system ... which is neve...r a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Merrily swinging on brier and weed, Near to the nest of his litle dame,... Over the mountainside or mead, Robert of Lincoln is telling his name: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were...) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fa...shions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »