It is not all bad, this getting old, ripening. After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I shou...ld live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial waxen complexion, which indicates that all th...e ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is--to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories--a m...ysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am ple...ased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in whic...h the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who ...want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I call demonic the restlessness which is innate and essential in every human being ... (that which) drives one beyond one's limits... into the infinite, into the elemental, as though nature had left behind in every individual soul an inexpressible, restless part of its original chaos, a part that wants to return with tension and passion to the super-human super-sensual element. The demon embodies the ferment, that bubbling, torturesome, upsetting ferment, which urges an otherwise calm life to move in the direction of all that is dangerous, towards excesses, ecstasy, selfdenial, selfdestruction; in most human beings, in the mediocre, this precious but dangerous part of the soul is soon absorbed and consumed ... restrained human beings stifle the Faustian drive within them, chloroform it with morality, dull it with work, restrain it with orderliness; the middle class person is always the mortal enemy of the chaotic.... But in superior human beings, especially in those who are productive, creative restlessness prevails in the form of dissatisfaction with everyday accomplishments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bryan is the least of a liar I know in public life. I have always found him direct and honest, and he never goes back on what he h...as said to me in private--a rare thing, if found, in public men. I found him purely frank.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »