The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though on...e of God's cheques has bounced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of "living well," which all men desire; all acts are but diff...erent means chosen to arrive at it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Ultimate Day really begins the night before, when you sit up until one o'clock trying to get things into trunk and bags. This ...is when you discover the well-known fact that summer air swells articles to twice or three times their original size.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mere fact of leaving ultimate social control in the hands of the people has not guaranteed that men will be able to conduct th...eir lives as free men. Those societies where men know they are free are often democracies, but sometimes they have strong chiefs and kings. ... they have, however, one common characteristic: they are all alike in making certain freedoms common to all citizens, and inalienable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes shit such a universal joke is that it's an unmistakeable reminder of our duality, of our soiled nature and of our will ...to glory. It is the ultimate lèse-majesté.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 »
Sexual liberation, as a slogan, turns out to be another kind of bondage. For a woman it offers orgasm as her ultimate and major fu...lfillment; it's better than motherhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The star is the ultimate American verification of Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile. His mere existence proves the perfectability of a...ny man or woman. Oh wonderful pliability of human nature, in a society where anyone can become a celebrity! And where any celebrity ... may become a star!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, w...ho would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »