[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.
These people,” he had said with his inscrutable smile, “are different from us. They don’t care about books and such things.
Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken...
She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.
..And songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.
The fact Locke didn't die instantly may be taken as proof that a human male can survive having every last warm drop of blood within his body rush instantly to the vicinity of his cheeks.
There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.
As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.
When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential.
So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit.
My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles.
In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.
Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.
The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the...
What do you think of the old boy?" said Jean. "He's got a strangely sunny view of ten years of defeat", said Locke, "but if I get killed in the next six weeks, I want him to speak at my funeral.
In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
Hans then asked him about painting from nature; Jackson...bluntly offered a phrase that entered Village lore, “I am nature.
There's no question that the Republic has done some horrible things to us all, that they might be doing those things. But... maybe I've also been seeing the things I to see. Maybe now that the old elector is gone, the Republic's soldiers have started...
for PEOPLE to rule themselves in a REPUBLIC , they must have virtue;for a TYRANT to rule in a TYRANNY ,he must use FEAR.
