I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in a...
The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked ...
The notion that we've made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law...
It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey an...
A victim evokes sympathy, right? Victims are not responsible, right? Victims have the moral high ground… someone else is causing the misery, right? Victims can easily justify why they are right. Victims allow themselves to be stuck in the status qu...
For some, vampires are still firmly in the 'evil, scary' column. However, in recent decades, vampires also run the gamut from evil to morally ambiguous all the way to fangless and vegetarian. I think part of their appeal lies in their versatility. Va...
Father James Lavelle: Leave home. Go somewhere where your chances of meeting available young women with loose morals are increased proportionately. Milo Herlihy: Sligo town, d'you mean? Father James Lavelle: No, I was thinking more: Dublin, London, N...
Dr. Millard Rausch, Scientist: We must think logically. We must deal with his crisis logically, with calm and unemotional response! We have to remain rational. We have to remain logical. TV Commentator: Scientists like you always think that way. That...
M. Gustave: I'm not angry with Serge; you can't blame someone for their basic lack of moral fiber. He's a frightened little yellow-bellied coward. It's not his fault, is it? Zero: I don't know, it depends. M. Gustave: Well, you can say that about mos...
Colonel Hugh Pickering: I'll have you know, Doolittle, that Mr. Higgins' intentions are entirely honorable! Alfred P. Doolittle: Oh, 'course they are, guv'nor. If I thought they wasn't, I'd ask fifty. Professor Henry Higgins: [shocked] You mean to sa...
Ricardo Morales: The worst part is I'm starting to forget. I have to constantly make myself remember her. Every day. The day she was killed, Liliana made me tea with lemon. I'd been coughing all night and she said it would help. I remember those stup...
[first lines] [English subtitles] Benjamín Esposito: [voiceover] On June 21st, 1974, Ricardo Morales had breakfast with Liliana Coloto for the last time. For the rest of his life he'd remember every single detail of that morning. Planning their firs...
Sherlock Holmes: Are you familiar with the study of graphology? Professor Moriaty: I have never given it any serious thought, no. Sherlock Holmes: The psychological analysis of handwriting. The upwards strokes on the p, the j, the m indicate a genius...
Most of us are perfect mothers as we love our children the most,but isn't this too natural.?..Worth are those, who are not only good mothers, but are sincere wives too, role modeling justice and equality for their children's moral upbringing.Moreover...
If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cann...
Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patte...
When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, become...
No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties...
Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a ver...
Because what my gradmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of th...
In our vital need ... science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the question which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions about the meaning or meaninglessnes...
