...I never drink wine ... I keep my hands soft and supple ... I sleep in a soft bed and never over-tire my body. It is because whe...n my hour strikes I must be a perfect instrument. My eyes must be steady, my brain clear, my nerves calm, my aim true. I must be prepared to do my work, successfully if God wills. But if I perish, I perish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state ...of victimization. When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts. After all, one reckons, "they" don't want me, "they" accept their own mediocrity and refuse my best, "they" don't deserve me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, o...r just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power o...r influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The idealist's programme of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never b...e successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate ...the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Athletes and actors--let actors stand for the set of performing artists--share much. They share the need to make gesture as fluid ...and economical as possible, to make out of a welter of choices the single, precisely right one. They share the need for impeccable and split-second timing. They share the need for thousands of hours of practice in order to train the body to become the perfect, instinctive instrument to express. Both athlete and actor, out of that congeries of emotion, choice, strategy, knowledge of terrain, mood of spectators, condition of spectators in the ensemble, secret awareness of injury or weakness, and as nearly an absolute concentration as possible so that all externalities are integrated, all distraction absorbed to the self, must be able to change the self so successfully that it changes us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have yet to deal successfully with American transraciality in real terms, as we have failed to redefine race in light of the mo...dern, twenty-first century progress of human kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »