Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, ...but it isn't exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned d...own the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are for aiding our allies by sharing some of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, ...but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107. We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a 2-million-dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. Are we, still in the ...prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and the craven? A thousand times no!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You sold Marmaros to the Russians. Scurried away in the night and left us to die. Is it to be wondered at that you should choose t...his place to build your house? The masterpiece of construction, built upon the masterpiece of destruction, the masterpiece of murder. The murderer of ten thousand men returns to the place of his crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Live a thousand years, I shall not find myself so apt to die.... No place will please me so, no mean of death, As here by Caesar, and by you cut off, The choice and master spirits of this age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand,... as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gent...ly lay themselves down and turn to mould!--painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky.... They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,--with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With a single companion, I soon found my way to the church of Notre Dame.... The Catholic are the only churches which I have seen ...worth remembering, which are not almost wholly profane. I do not speak only of the rich and splendid like this, but of the humblest of them as well. Coming from the hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed aside the listed door of this church, and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any. There sat one or two women who had stolen a moment from the concerns of the day, as they were passing; but, if there had been fifty people there, it would still have been the most solitary place imaginable. They did not look up at us, nor did one regard another.... I was impressed by the quiet, religious atmosphere of the place. It was a great cave in the midst of a city; and what were the altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalactites, into which you entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought? Such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays, hardly long enough for an airing, and then filled with a bustling congregation,--a church where the priest is the least part, where you do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be heard. I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted. I think that I might go to church myself some Monday, if I lived in a city where there was such a one to go to.... As for the Protestant churches, here or elsewhere, they did not interest me, for it is only as caves that churches interest me at all, and in that respect they were inferior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »