The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We envy not the warmer clime, that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies,... Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's Isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look ...through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for... larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England's many spurious gifts to the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse- nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice--with an angel bobbing a...bout unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as they please, they are very hard to drive. Oh, England. Sick in head and sick in heart, Sick in whole and every part, And yet sicker thou art still For thinking that thou art not ill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is real...ly going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy, and then ...we should see our way a little more clearly without falling into Judaism, or Toryism, or Jacobinism, or any other ism whatever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why doesn't the United States take over the monarchy and unite with England? England does have important assets. Naturally the lon...ger you wait, the more they will dwindle. At least you could use it for a summer resort instead of Maine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a sweet view--sweet to the eye and the mind. British verdure, British culture, British comfort, seen under a sun bright, wi...thout being oppressive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »