I am no lover of pompous title, but only desire that my name may be recorded in a line or two, which shall briefly express my name..., my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An ideologue may be defined as a mad intellectual. He is not interested in ideas, but--almost the exact contrary--in one idea. Whe...n he erects this idea into a system and forces the system to give birth to a way of life, confusion often results, usually to his great surprise. Two examples are Robespierre and Lenin. The intellectual is occasionally blamed for the work of the ideologue, which is like condemning the psychiatrist because he and the patient are both involved in the same thing, mental illness. The ideologue is often brilliant. Consequently some of us distrust brilliance when we should distrust the ideologue.... The ideologue is often more persuasive than the intellectual because he has a simpler line of goods to sell and never questions its value. Sometimes he achieves great success by attacking the real intellectual--Bryan is a good example.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Basically the cleavage between the two cities is of the simplest: Dallas is where the east ends, and Fort Worth is notoriously "wh...ere the west begins." Dallas is a baby Manhattan; Fort Worth is a cattle annex. Dallas has the suave and glittering clothes of Neiman Marcus; Fort Worth has dust and stockyards. For this a perfectly good historical reason exists. The Texas and Pacific Railway, reaching Dallas from the east in 1872, stopped there; the line was not pushed the few miles westward to Fort Worth till 1876. And in the intervening years dozens of big eastern firms--mercantile establishments, distributors, and the like--got nicely settled in Dallas, and have stayed there ever since. Dallas was the end of the line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alicia Huberman: Look, I'll make it easy for you. The time has come when you must tell me that you have a wife and two adorable ch...ildren, and this madness between us can't go on any longer. T.R. Devlin: I bet you've heard that line often enough. Alicia: Right below the belt every time. Oh that isn't fair, Dev. Devlin: Skip it. We have other things to talk about. We have a job.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connect...s one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Aesthetically at odds, these two genres of mass humor form a Janus face of American culture. Stand-up is a surviving bastion of in...dividual expression. The comedian confronts the audience with his or her personality and wins celebration--the highest form of acceptance--or is scorned and rebuffed as a pitiable outsider. The heckler, the mood of the audience, or the temperature of the room cannot always be handled through quality control. Even when presented electronically, the jokes of a stand-up monologue cannot be underlined by canned laughter without the manipulation thoroughly exposing itself.... The sitcom, by contrast, is the technology of the assembly-line brought to art. Even when live audiences are used, their reactions are "sweetened" with carefully calculated titters, chortles, and guffaws. Large sums of investment capital must be assembled to produce a sitcom; all factors must be controlled by recognized experts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why is it that no photograph of a person has the depth a painted portrait can have? The two embody different quantities of time. A... photograph is a "snapshot," whether or not it was posed; it shows one particular moment of time and what the person looked like right then, what his surface showed. During the extended hours a painting is sat for, though, its subject shows a range of traits, emotions, and thoughts, all revealed in differing lights. Combining different glimpses of the person, choosing an aspect here, a tightening of muscle there, a glint of light, a deepening of line, the painter interweaves these different portions of surface, never before simultaneously exhibited, to produce a fuller portrait and a deeper one. The portraitist can select one tiny aspect of everything shown at a moment to incorporate into the final painting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »