Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perf...ectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable... and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the... healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; independent; irresponsible; looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abunda...nt and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mothers and fathers act in mostly similar ways toward their young children. Psychologists are still highlighting small differences... rather than the overwhelming similarities in parents' behaviors. I think this is a hangover from the 1950s re-emergence of father as a parent. He has to be special. The best summary of the evidence on mothers and fathers with their babies is that young children of both sexes, in most circumstances, like both parents equally well. Fathers, like mothers, are good parents first and gender representatives second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poem is like a person. Though it has a family tree, it is important not because of its ancestors but because of its individualit...y. The poem, like any human being, is something more than its most complete analysis. Like any human being, it gives a sense of unified individuality which no summary of its qualities can reproduce; and at the same time a sense of variety which is beyond satisfactory final analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gentleness, modesty, and sweetness of her character were warmly expatiated on, that sweetness which makes so essential a part ...of every woman's worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has sta...mped with its own freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of ...doom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »