The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wi...shes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think it saves much confusion to regard religion as quite distinct from morality, or the right conduct of life--as having necess...arily nothing to do with these, but as a system of faith and worship, a belief in something extranatural.... Indeed, the most religious people are by no means the most moral. Hence it is that religion so rarely changes the man, or makes him practically any better. Let us keep things separated, religion by itself, and morality by itself. Religion implies a belief in the supernatural; in a personal deity who takes sides with or against us. A man may be pure, noble, virtuous, high-minded, spiritual, and not have a religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science... is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our system of government, in spite of Vietnam, Cambodia, CIA, Watergate, is still the best system of government on earth. And the ...greatest resource of all are the 215 million Americans who still have within us the strength, the character, the intelligence, the experience, the patriotism, the idealism, the compassion, the sense of brotherhood on which we can rely in the future to restore the greatness to our country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. Thi...s system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this... faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that i...t can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under ...the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for its shape and comfort.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Social and scientific progress are assured, sir, once our great system of postpossession payments is in operation, not the install...ment plan, no sir, but a system of small postpossession payments that clinch the investment. No possible rational human wish unfulfilled. A man with a salary of fifty dollars a week can start payments on a Rolls-Royce, the Waldorf-Astoria, or a troupe of trained seals if he so desires.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the way--about Bolshevism: one has to remember that all that is published in the press is propaganda, that the Bolsheviki are t...he moderate social-revolutionaries, a political party, and the Soviets are a system of government based on the idea of "pure democracy" (Mso called in the textbooks on gov't) that every man shall take direct part in the government of the country--which is arrived at by industrial representation through the heirarchy of soviets, and that much the same system would be in vogue in America--(geographical instead of industrial units) if Hamilton and the rest had taken the New England town-meeting as the unit of government instead of importing Montesquieu's ideas. It's silly to idealize things in Russia, but it is criminal to condemn them unheard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »