It almost alarms me how free I feel on the ice. I don't think about the hospital or the groceries or the kids--I'm just in touch w...ith myself. It's exciting when your whole body is moving in synchronous motion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A computer does not think, it feels nothing, and what it is said to "know"--bits of information all cast in the digital mode--has ...no fringe. Nor has it a memory, only storage room. On any point called for, the answer is all or none. Vagueness, intelligent confusion, original punning on words or ideas never occur, the internal hookups being unchangeable; they were determined once for all by the true minds that made the machine and program. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity; the greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bou...rgeois profundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female do...mination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, leve...l, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, inconte...stably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hawthorne--like Poe--became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as E...merson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the "tale," was really a convert to aesthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of "grotesques and arabesques" who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt. Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In its purest sense, nicknaming is an elitist ritual practiced by those who cherish hierarchy. For preppies it's a smoke signal th...at allows Bunny to tell Pooky that they belong to the same tribe, while among the good ole boys it serves the cause of masculine dominance by identifying Bear and Wrecker as Alpha males.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »