..it lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The students could be, as it were (he said)...
No one, none of us have rights. There is no destiny. We have responsibilities to ourselves and each other. We have responsibilities and the choice whether or not we live up to those responsibilities.
I keep trying, and manage some workmanlike stuff that doesn't require inspiration, and then I check my phone, check my email, go on Facebook. I read other people's posts, make jaunty comments, flitter away the time, profane the time.
I'm not limited by my gender, and I don't think anyone else should be either. Because I am the age I am and I sort of rode the crest of the first profound post-suffragette feminists, I wasn't fighting to burn my bra. Those women fought that fight jus...
Frank Capra, Hollywood's Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the 'Saturday Evening Post' covers of Norman Rockwell. 'It's A Wonderful Life,...
There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.
Apathy's just a front. People offer it when there's something stronger hiding underneath. You have to work harder to tap into it, but then your performance has even more power.
But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the w...
I wanted people to know that we fired rounds into moving trucks and open windows to survive, not for anyone else’s freedom. Not for the Democrats. Not for Republicans. Just to survive.
No matter what the reason, the ways I tried to justify the situation, the second-guessing that lingered, nothing could change the fact that people stopped existing because of me.
Most likely, they were writing the same type of macho bullshit that I wrote, trying to sound tough with their words in case words were all that made it home.
The substance of every true and stable political organism is something resembling an Order, a Männerbünd in charge of the principle of the imperium, comprising men who see loyalty as the basis of their honor.
In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused,
We were all used to Dad's little show-off sessions, and though they were never worthy of excitement, we always tried to humor him. (Last weekend he'd called us out to the lawn to see what a big pile of dandelions he'd weeded.)
If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its image...
He would like to be capable of writing as he thinks, quickly, without effort, the word as agile and dynamic as athletes in a race, jumping over hurdles, one after the other, go, go, go, flying towards the finishing post, faster than the disgust limpi...
Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly...
Do not allow the adumbrations of Aristotelian logic to prevent you from seeing a vast spectrum of truths; the post-Boolean continuum of shades of grey where we spend most of our lives.
A popular bumper sticker post-9/11, and pretty faded these days, proclaims drivers of the cars to be 'Proud to be an American.' It really should say 'Lucky to be an American,' for I doubt very much that the drivers had much say in having been born he...
Well, let me tell you, if you're 45, had three children and are post-menopausal, you're not going to weigh what you did the day you graduated from high school. Get that out of your head. That's a media-driven ideal that you're never going to healthfu...
The emails and the tweets and the Facebook posts and the fan mail that we get from young people all over America that are on the football team or on the hockey team are so touching. They tell me, 'Hey, this is me. I still have to remain in the closet...
