Boasting is often carried by certain Americans to the extreme. Often however it is a reaction against slights, an effort to veil d...eficiencies, an effort made by a people aware of them, but on the other hand conscious of having accomplished in two or three generations what it took other nations centuries to perform. Generally, human nature revolts at taunts, at arrogant reproof, at undervaluation. Experience and time alone teach a becoming equanimity. European nations bear scoffing more patiently because they have thrown it occasionally for centuries at each other's head. Like old war horses accustomed to the roar of battles, they remain cool and self-possessed. There is on the American surface much to be rubbed off and rounded. Rude angles are to be soft ened, ease, flexibility instilled. Time must do the work. Refinement is a fruit slowly ripened by ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The automobile and the telephone are defeated as instruments of individualism by being applied to the needs of a mass society. The... automobile fulfills man's desire to move over the surface of the earth all by himself; but by becoming accessible to everybody, automobiles have paralyzed our streets. Individualism is possible only in plenty of empty space. Similarly, telephones block their own paths of individual communication when everybody is talking: the phone is too often "busy." Private enterprise cannot but strangle itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to t...hat fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not... Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although I mean it, and project the meaning As hard as I can into its brushed-metal surface,... It cannot, in this deteriorating climate, pick up Where I leave off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fa...ult for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness... of a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »