... women are supposed to be unfit to vote because they are hysterical and emotional and of course men would not like to have emot...ion enter into a political campaign. They want to cut out all emotion and so they would like to cut us out. I had heard so much about our emotionalism that I went to the last Democratic national convention, held at Baltimore, to observe the calm repose of the male politicians. I saw some men take a picture of one gentleman whom they wanted elected and it was so big they had to walk sidewise as they carried it forward; they were followed by hundreds of other men screaming and yelling, shouting and singing the "Houn' Dawg".... I saw men jump up on the seats and throw their hats in the air and shout: "What's the matter with Champ Clark?" Then, when those hats came down, other men would kick them back into the air, shouting at the top of their voices: "He's all right!!"... No hysteria about it--just patriotic loyalty, splendid manly devotion to principle. And so they went on and on until 5 o'clock in the morning--the whole night long. I saw men jump up on their seats and jump down again and run around in a ring. I saw two men run towards another man to hug him both at once and they split his coat up the middle of his back and sent him spinning around like a wheel. All this with the perfect poise of the legal male mind in politics! I have been to many women's conventions in my day but I never saw a woman leap up on a chair and take off her bonnet and toss it up in the air and shout: "What's the matter with" somebody. I never saw a woman knock another woman's bonnet off her head as she screamed, "She's all right!".... But we are willing to admit that we are emotional. I have actually seen women stand up and wave their handkerchiefs. I have even seen them take hold of hands and sing, "Blest be the tie that binds." Nobody doubts that women are excitable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encou...nters only too rarely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a... city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God a...nd his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with... the beastly words that stand for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's sel...f in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society."... This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails lea...ving one's ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one's life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one's "real" life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »