I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a ...hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it.... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines.... I change everyone's coiffure--except those that please me--and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear ... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents do get very angry with their parents, and acknowledging this anger is part of acknowledging them. If the anger is not ...acknowledged then its expression is increased. The parent seems super-strong. The adolescent tries to become the super-attacker.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret su...per-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived...I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economical...ly; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the past, the English tried to impose a system wherever they went. They destroyed the nation's culture and one of the by- produ...cts of their systemisation was that they destroyed their own folk culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the con...sequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.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 »
Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisi...tion obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Preschoolers sound much brighter and more knowledgeable than they really are, which is why so many parents and grandparents are so... sure their progeny are gifted and super-bright. Because children's questions sound so mature and sophisticated, we are tempted to answer them at a level of abstraction far beyond the child's level of comprehension. That is a temptation we should resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus ...would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »