To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers.
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I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women: I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair....
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Nor now the long light on the sea— And here face downward in the sun...
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Ambassador Puser the ambassador Reminds himself in French, felicitous tongue,...
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Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.
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Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year
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We are as great as our belief in human liberty -- no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
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Men are more accountable for their motives, than for anything else; and primarily, morality consists in the motives, that is in the affections.
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The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
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Places are produced in that wonderful interaction of people, place, narrative, and time. When the people desert these places, narratives are forgotten, ties break, and the place is unmade. What is un-remembered in abandonment cannot be re-remembered in transient automobile suburbs with too few places for shared experience and story making. The extreme is amnesia, and it means that those afflicted do not know who they are anymore. They are disoriented, isolated, and robbed of the ability to recognize emotional attachments to others. The sufferers do not have a coherent story anymore. Un-remembering is the enemy of good places and of public history.
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What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
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It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
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The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
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There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
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Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness.
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation Like dream words most)
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A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
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And crossed the dark defile at last, and found At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain...
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A great many college graduates come here thinking of lawyers as social engineers arguing the great Constitutional issues.
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No amount of study or learning will make a man a leader unless he has the natural qualities of one.
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To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
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Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.
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Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.
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Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
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