Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men ...under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Constitutional statutes ... which embody the settled public opinion of the people who enacted them and whom they are to govern--ca...n always be enforced. But if they embody only the sentiments of a bare majority, pronounced under the influence of a temporary excitement, they will, if strenuously opposed, always fail of their object; nay, they are likely to injure the cause they are framed to advance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health--congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of b...oozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A bestial and violent man will go so far as to kill because he is under the influence of drink, exasperated, or driven by rage and... alcohol. He is paltry. He does not know the pleasure of killing, the charity of bestowing death like a caress, of linking it with the play of the noble wild beasts: every cat, every tiger, embraces its prey and licks it even while it destroys it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are ...required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For character too is a process and an unfolding ... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too sel...f confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies' resources,... and minimized their own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which b...eauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »