All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian e...ndeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Setting aside the vast herd which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the minority distinguished by what is c...ommonly regarded as an excess of sin is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the average wine-bibbler is a far better fellow than the average prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the average poor drudge, and that the worst white-slave trader of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as s...laves and degraded them as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the monstruosity in love, lady--that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the... act a slave to limit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hear ... foreigners, who would boycott an employer if he hired a colored workman, complain of wrong and oppression, of low wages... and long hours, clamoring for eight-hour systems ... ah, come with me, I feel like saying, I can show you workingmen's wrong and workingmen's toil which, could it speak, would send up a wail that might be heard from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; and should it unite and act, would shake this country from Carolina to California.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? ...... This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless th' accursed, Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves, And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American ideal ... of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and I...ndians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden--as an unpatriotic act--that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agree...d that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »