I wish I could take back some of the things I said and some of the things I did. But in the bigger picture, I don't feel that it w...as violent and terrible. I feel like it was primarily--obviously not completely--moral, based on a vision that the government should be better, and that people could be better, and that democracy should be real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christianity was only a very strong and singularly well-timed Salvation Army movement that happened to receive help from an unusua...l and highly dramatic incident. It was a Puritan reaction in an age when, no doubt, a Puritan reaction was much wanted; but like all sudden violent reactions, it soon wanted reacting against.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere blue...r than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. ...I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. ... in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid, And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;... The city to the soldier's rage resigned; Successless wars, and poverty behind; Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores, And the rash hunter strangled by the boars; The newborn babe by nurses overlaid; And the cook caught within the raging fire he made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness When everything is as it was in my childhood... Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility: That the sun and the moon broke over my head.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks ...on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France, and of Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of him;" "assez de Bonaparte."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is obvious that the French Revolution was a vaster and more profound social upheaval, involving more violent conflict between c...lasses, more radical reorganization of government and society, more far-reaching redefinition of marriage, property, and civil law as well as of organs of public authority, more redistribution of wealth and income, more fears on the part of the rich and more demands from the poor, more sensational repercussions in other countries, more crises of counterrevolution, war, and invasion, and more drastic or emergency measures, as in the Reign of Terror. From very early in the French Revolution the American Revo lution came to seem very moderate. Thomas Jefferson, who was then in France, feared that the French were going to dangerous extremes as early as June 1789.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass..., I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance ... that I was... seized with a violent tremour.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »