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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 601d6a7 | But what if Clausewitz and Tolstoy were wrestling with contradictions--perhaps even relishing the contest--rather than agonizing over them? 13 Both see determinism as laws to which there can be no exceptions: "If even one man out of millions in a thousand-year period of time has had the possibility of acting freely," Tolstoy writes, "then it is obvious that one free act of this man, contrary to the laws, destroys the possibility of the exis.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 9eda038 | The outcome defied categories. 46 Was it a victory for principle or expediency? For the rights of man or the rules of statecraft? For lightness of being or heaviness of hand? For a republic or, as Washington himself put it, an "empire"? To say "all of the above" dodges the question, but usefully. For if Burke was right that governments should balance dissatisfactions, if Elizabeth was right to set precedents rather than be bound by them, if.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| ae29e4b | Whatever their contradictions, Americans were consistent, before and after their first revolution, in deeply distrusting government. Having been left on their own for so long, the colonists saw as sinister any British action affecting them: "[ T] he most minor incidents," the historian Gordon Wood has shown, "erupted into major constitutional questions involving the basic liberties of the people." 49 Allergies that extreme don't easily disa.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 8fa7791 | Human, we treat them as we treat others, take for granted services to which they did not pretend. But we force telephones to corrupt intimacy while they pretend to preserve it by keeping alive only its dangerous immediate symptoms. Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a t.. | William Gaddis | ||
| b07cfb7 | I, it's just, listen, criticism? It's the most important art now, it's the one we need most now. Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don't you see? not the "if I'd done it myself . . ." Yes, a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions" | William Gaddis | ||
| 51bb42e | They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. | William Gaddis | ||
| da3c1f3 | The Australian sculptor who made leather sandals said that Beethoven's duet for viola and cello sounded to him like two bulky women rummaging under a bed. Behind him a girl said, --Of course I like music, but not just to listen to. | William Gaddis | ||
| 260d987 | And someone said, --Nothing queer about Carruthers . . . to conclude, once for all, the story of that subaltern and his mare. | William Gaddis | ||
| a702358 | A product would drop out of sight overnight without advertising, I don't care what it is, a book or a brand of soap, it would drop out of sight. We've had the goddam Ages of Faith, we've had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity. | William Gaddis | ||
| 5a9899a | I can't imagine cutting my wrists in Pokheepsie | William Gaddis | ||
| e69fd38 | Of course, if Saint Peter could come out today upon these streets below he would find all he could wish, voices from nowhere, music from unpopulated boxes, men ascending divine distances in gas balloons, and traveling at the speed of sound, apparitions from nowhere appear on the screen; the sick are raised from the dead, life is prolonged so that every detail of pain may be relished, the blind are given eyes and the cripples forced to walk,.. | William Gaddis | ||
| f45cc98 | are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets. | William Gaddis | ||
| d7c110f | He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correc.. | William Gaddis | ||
| aab8301 | In this world, God must serve the Devil. | William Gaddis | ||
| 5dea6b4 | Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. | William Gaddis | ||
| 3ba1199 | Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people . . . | William Gaddis | ||
| 355c148 | Someone had already remarked that Bruckner had been Hitler's favorite composer, someone else, that there was something wrong with any young person who really enjoyed the late Beethoven; someone had already confided that the soap business in America amounted to seven million dollars a year, someone else that advertising amounted to seven billion. | William Gaddis | ||
| 4fbf247 | Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust it's own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink it's teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next. | William Gaddis | ||
| 2442fd9 | You and I doctor, on the beach. | William Gaddis | ||
| 24dfb0c | do you know why the French are so honest? because there are so few words in their language they're forced to be. | William Gaddis | ||
| cfff0a9 | Their pursuits were by now so mysterious to one another that neither showed surprise at anything the other did or said, each, in fact, depending more and more heavily on the other for encouragement, an arrangement somewhat similar to that magic formula of modern marriage, whose parties are encouraged by disapprobation and disinterest respectively. | William Gaddis | ||
| 26ac237 | The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed. | words | William Gaddis | |
| ac65b54 | has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos a.. | William Gaddis | ||
| ce77b07 | Stupidity's the deliberate cultivation of ignorance. | William Gaddis | ||
| 16dd3a7 | Free trade and Christianity, it's the German East Africa Company, it's French Equatorial Africa, it's the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there's nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that's what the whole damned first world war was all ab... | William Gaddis | ||
| 409b1a5 | In simple straightforward terms Dan, you might say that he structured the material in terms of the ongoing situation to tangibilitate the utilization potential of this one to one instructional medium in such a meaningful learning experience that these kids won't forget it for a hell of a long time, how's that Whiteback. | William Gaddis | ||
| d9fc678 | No... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands of them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what.. | William Gaddis | ||
| ab842bb | Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was .. | William Gaddis | ||
| b6c3de9 | The coincidences turn up down to the smallest details. There is, for instance, a character who has covered the mirrors with handkerchiefs. Apparently this happens somewhere in , too. And they said, Ah! This is where he got that. Where I got it was when I was in a hotel in Panama and I had washed my handkerchiefs and spread them on the windows and the mirrors to dry--they almost look pressed when they're peeled away that way--a Panamanian f.. | inspiration sources | William Gaddis | |
| 1f1fa74 | Nevertheless, they boarded The Purdue Victory and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided for against all inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God. | William Gaddis | ||
| f2dd06d | What shall I do, in a Purgatory?... where they all speak spanish? I've never been in any kind of Purgatory before, and no one(...) | William Gaddis | ||
| 3ffdf3b | Wyatt was, in fact, finding the Christian system suspect. Memory of his fourth birthday party still weighted in his mind. It had been planned cautiously by Aunt May, to the exact number of hats and favors and portions of cake. One guest, no friend to Wyatt (from a family "less fortunate than we are"), showed up with a staunchly party-bent brother. (Not only no friend: a week before he had challenged Wyatt through the fence behind the carria.. | William Gaddis | ||
| 5e692f7 | Father says! ...her voice cut him through. --Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord. To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did. His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man, he tried to steal the power of Our Lord and to bring his own light to man. He tried to become original, she pronounced malignantly, shaping that word round the whol.. | William Gaddis | ||
| c0ab7e7 | success and like free enterprise and all | and free-enterprise like success | william gaddis | |
| 3d4ff31 | Go out among them and tell them that their nostalgia for places they have never been is sex, | William Gaddis | ||
| 974945c | Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes simplicity serves, though even the static i.. | William Gaddis | ||
| 07d6264 | Up the coast of the New World, the ship bearing ten million bananas ground out its course, every minute the waste heaving brokenly around it more brilliant as the moon rose off the starboard bow and moved into the sky with effortless guile , unashamed of the stigmata blemishing the face she showed from the frozen fogs of the Grand Banks to the jungles of Brazil where along the Rio Branco they knew her for a girl who loved her brother the su.. | geography-and-culture | William Gaddis | |
| e130aef | She paints some, Stanley said in a vindicatory tone. -Paints! Did you see the abstract she did for the Army Air Force? the face persisted. -For a psychological test, they used it to pick out the queers, if you were queer the painting didn't look like anything, if you weren't it looked like a snatch. | William Gaddis | ||
| 30b034e | Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories--so gross that they will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. | Ford Madox Ford | ||
| 7d980a4 | But of course he hates you for being in the army. All the men who aren't hate all the men that are. | Ford Madox Ford | ||
| f348d50 | Sylvia knew he was only now formulating his settled opinion so as not to have his active brain to give to the discussion. | Ford Madox Ford | ||
| d61f88c | Our Minister for Water-closets won't keep two and a half million men in any base in order to get the votes of their women | Ford Madox Ford | ||
| 198721c | A world with England presenting the spectacles of moral cowardice will be a world on a lower plane.... If | Ford Madox Ford | ||
| 6267a73 | A world profits by the example of a steadfast nation.... | Ford Madox Ford |