It's unlikely I'll ever submit to a psychiatrist's couch. I don't want some stranger prowling around through my psyche, monkeying ...with my id. I don't need an analyst to tell me that I have never had any sense of security. Who has?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black chil...dren without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Construed ... as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certai...n set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses--those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the last fifteen years or so, the women's novel has turned into the Amtrak of American literature; crashing through the gates a...t Aristotle, jumping the tracks at Horace, ignoring the flashing red lights at Boileau, and scooping up Alexander Pope in the cowcatcher. The rules are down and it's every stylist for herself in this best of all Tupperware parties, where plot and characterization have been replaced by the kind of non-stop chatter that enabled the French Foreign Legion to meet its enlistment quota for a hundred and fifty years. In the unlikely event that future scholars will bother to give our era a cultural tag, it will be called the Age of Women's Litter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Romance, as currently used, then denotes what is unreal or unlikely, or at all events not present, in contrast to what is scientif...ically true and accessible to the senses here and now. Or it is, in its purest expression, what partakes of the marvelous, the extreme, the unusual. That is why advertisement (in a grotesque and inflated form) is a pure expression of the romantic mind. Indeed, there is nothing so "romantic" as advertisement. Advertisement is the apotheosis of the marvelous and the unusual; likewise of the scientifically untrue. The spirit of advertisement can boost lives and has its feverish being in a world of hyperbolic suggestion; it is also the trance or dreamworld of the hypnotist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unlikely that someone could proclaim "truths" that are counter to physical laws for very long (for example, that it is healt...hy for children to run around in bathing suits in winter and in fur coats in summer) without appearing ridiculous. But it is perfectly normal to speak of the necessity of striking and humiliating children and robbing them of their autonomy, at the same time using such high-sounding words as chastising, upbringing, and guiding onto the right path.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Imagine believing in the control of inflation by curbing the money supply! That is like deciding to stop your dog fouling the side...walk by plugging up its rear end. It is highly unlikely to succeed, but if it does it kills the hound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now, it may be stretching an analogy to compare epidemics of cholera--caused by a known agent--with that epidemic of violent crime... which is destroying our cities. It is unlikely that our social problems can be traced to a single, clearly defined cause in the sense that a bacterial disease is "caused" by a microbe. But, I daresay, social science is about as advanced in the late twentieth century as bacteriological science was in the mid nineteenth century. Our forerunners knew something about cholera; they sensed that its spread was associated with misdirected sewage, filth, and the influx of alien poor into crowded, urban tenements. And we know something about street crime; nowhere has it been reported that a member of the New York Stock Exchange has robbed a poor, black teenager at the point of a gun. Indeed, I am naively confident that an enlightened social scientist of the next century will be able to point out that we had available to us at least some of the clues to the cause of urban crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of justice--that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessio...ns upon the same terms as to the men--because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand.... Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »