We walk along the cliff, and I feel a sudden impulse to push you over, which I promptly do: I acted on impulse, yet I certainly in...tended to push you over, and may even have devised a little ruse to achieve it; yet even then I did not act deliberately, for I did not (stop to) ask myself whether to do it or not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing, neither acceptance nor prohibition, will induce a child to stop swearing overnight. Teach your child respect for himself ...and others, that profanity can hurt, offend, and disgust, and you'll be doing the best you can...And save your parental giggling over mispronounced curses for after the children's bedtime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If women were umpiring none of this [rowdyism] would happen. Do you suppose any ball player in the country would step up to a good...-looking girl and say to her, "You color- blind, pickle-brained, cross-eyed idiot, if you don't stop throwing the soup into me I'll distribute your features all over you countenance!" Of course he wouldn't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. ...Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can't stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn't legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the cour...t; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The office ... make[s] its incumbent a repair man behind a dyke. No sooner is one leak plugged than it is necessary to dash over a...nd stop another that has broken out. There is no end to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People having speech defects sometimes learn part of the practice by laborious study, but good speech is always mainly unconscious... speech. Any tennis player, even if he could not explain this enigma, could provide an analogy for it. When he sees a rapidly flying tennis ball coming toward him, he knows what he must do. He must maneuver himself into the proper position, be poised with his weight properly distributed, meet the ball with the proper sweep of his arm and with his racket held at just the right pitch, and all this must be timed to stop the flying ball at a precise point. But if the tennis player pauses to think of all these actions and how he will perform them, he is lost. The ball will not skim back over the net, building air pressure as it goes until it buzzes down into the opponent's corner. If the tennis player thinks about anything except where he wants the ball to go and what he plans for the next stroke, he will probably become so awkward that he will be lucky to hit the ball at all. Rapid, precise muscular actions can be successfully carried out only by the unconscious part of the brain. And so with the speaker. He cannot speak well unless he speaks unconsciously, for his movements are as precise, as complicated, and as exactly timed as those of the tennis player.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lora May: Did you ever stop to think, Porter, that in over three years there's one word we've never said to each other, even in fu...n. Porter: To you, I'm a cash register. You can't love a cash register. Lora May: And I'm part of your inventory. You can't love that either.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Until they saw, over the mists of Venus, two fish creatures stop... on spangled legs and crawl from the belly of the sea. And from the planet park they heard the new fruit drop.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physica...lly absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »