There is no question but that you and I think alike in the great objectives of the peace when it comes. The real problem lies in t...he methods to be used to attain peace without hate.... [I]t is my thought that time is an essential in disseminating the ideals of peace among the very diverse nationalities and national egos of a vast number of separate peoples who, for one reason or another over a thousand years, have divided themselves into a hundred different forms of hate.... Therefore, I have been visualizing a superimposed--or if you like it, a superassumed--obligation by Russia, China, Britain and ourselves that we will act as sheriffs for the maintenance of order during the transition period.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History in the making is a very uncertain thing. It might be better to wait till the South American republic has got through with ...its twenty-fifth revolution before reading much about it. When it is over, some one whose business it is, will be sure to give you in a digested form all that it concerns you to know, and save you trouble, confusion, and time. If you will follow this plan, you will be surprised to find how new and fresh your interest in what you read will become.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, i...n its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietl...y done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunate...ly their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy D...rew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials--to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only on...e woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry is creative expression; poetry is constructive expression. That, in a sentence, is the real distinction.... In poetry the w...ords are born or re-born in the act of thinking. The words are, in Bergsonian phraseology, a becoming; they develop in the mind pari passu with the development of the thought. There is no time interval between the words and the thought. The thought is the word and the word is the thought, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. "Constructive" implies ready-made materials; words stacked round the builder, ready for use. Prose is a structure of ready-made words. Its "creative" function is confined to plan and elevation--functions these, too, of Poetry, but in Poetry subsidiary to the creative function.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We were trying to find out a sound plan of distributing money; and every time we proposed to distribute it according to personal m...erit or achievement or dignity or individual quality of any sort the plan reduced itself to absurdity. When we tried to establish a relation between money and character we were beaten. When we tried to establish a relation between money and the dignity that gives authority we were beaten. And when we gave it up as a bad job and thought of leaving things as they are we found that they would not stay as they are.... The only way out of this is to give everybody the same, which is the Socialist solution of the distribution problem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the element that distinguishes applied science from basic. Surprise is what makes the difference. When you are organized t...o apply knowledge, set up targets, produce a usable product, you require a high degree of certainty from the outset. All the facts on which you base protocols must be reasonably hard facts with unambiguous meaning. The challenge is to plan the work and organize the workers so that it will come out precisely as predicted. For this, you need centralized authority, elaborately detailed time schedules, and some sort of reward system based on speed and perfection. But most of all you need the intelligible basic facts to begin with, and these must come from basic research. There is no other source. In basic research, everything is just the opposite. What you need at the outset is a high degree of uncertainty; otherwise it isn't likely to be an important problem. You start with an incomplete roster of facts, characterized by their ambiguity; often the problem consists of discovering the connections between unrelated pieces of information. You must plan experiments on the basis of probability, even bare possibility, rather than certainty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »