Traditionally, marriage involved a kind of bartering, rather than mutual inter-dependence or role sharing. Husbands financially an...d economically supported wives, while wives emotionally, psychologically and socially supported husbands. He brought home the bacon, she cooked it. He fixed the plumbing, she the psyche.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two archetypes pervade Western thinking on the subject of how reality is best apprehended, archetypes that have their ultimate ori...gin in Plato and Aristotle. For Plato sense data were at best a distraction from knowledge, which was the province of unaided reason. For Aristotle, knowledge consisted in generalizations, but these were derived in the first instance from information gathered from the outside world. These two models of human thinking, termed rationalism and empiricism, respectively, formed the major intellectual legacy of the West down to Descartes and Bacon, who represented, in the seventeenth century, the twin poles of epistemology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A more equal, if threadbare illustration of the antithesis between humanism and the gospel of scientific progress is found, of cou...rse, in Montaigne and Bacon.... The sovereignty of man, says Bacon in one of his massive phrases, lieth hid in knowledge. Montaigne would agree, but his terms would have an entirely different meaning. Bacon means that through scientific knowledge man can conquer external nature for his own use and benefit. Montaigne would mean that through study of his own inner strength and weakness man can learn to conquer himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses an...d we short, and that we talk much and they little. In England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, sodomy and smoking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion in a corner, without any more ado or ceremony, than feed upon turkey at ano...ther man's table, where one is fain to sit mincing and chewing his meat an hour together, drink little, be always wiping his fingers and his chops, and never dare to cough nor sneeze, though he has never so much a mind to it, nor do a many things which a body may do freely by one's self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world,... he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delecta...ble necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The traditional husband/father has always made choices concerning career, life-styles, values, and directions for the whole family..., but he generally had another person on the team--called a wife. And his duties were always clear: Bring home the bacon and take out the garbage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book, but time and like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he...? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, "They are published and not published."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »