Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
|
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
Sports
|
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
|
He does have, underneath a sort of serious exterior, a really wonderful sense of humor, ... It rarely shows itself in the trial lawyer mode, but it certainly does in personal relationships.
|
I have a suggestion that I think would help fight serious crime. Signs. There are lots of signs for minor infractions: No Smoking, Stay Off the Grass, Keep Out, and they seem to work fairly well. I think we should also have signs for major crimes: Murder Strictly Prohibited, NO Raping People, Thank You for Not Kidnapping Anyone. It's certainly worth a try. I'm convinced Watergate would never have happened if there had just been a sign in the Oval Office that said, Malfeasance of Office Is Strictly Against the Law, or Thank You for Not Undermining the Constitution.
|
I like the bad-boy types. Generally the guy I'm attracted to is the guy in the club with all the tattoos and nail polish. He's usually the lead singer in a punk band and plays guitar. But my serious boyfriends are relatively clean-cut, nice guys. So it's strange.
|
Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
|
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
|
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
|
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
|
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
|
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
|
Mobile broadband, which recently entered the U.S. market, is rapidly becoming the 'must have' technology in an industry already accelerating its shift away from desktop computers. This high-speed, broad-reach wireless technology opens up a serious set of future possibilities for both business and entertainment markets, creating one of the most powerful growth opportunities we have ever seen.
|
To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.
|
My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
|
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
|
Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.
|
The most serious charge that can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
|
The person who can be only serious or only cheerful, is but half a man.
|
In most communities it is illegal to cry 'fire' in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?
|
AIDS is such a scary thing and it's also the kind of thing that you think won't happen to you. It can happen to you and it's deadly serious.
|
I say in my book that a lot of the music our forebears created was written for rich, snotty, snobby people who had enough money to buy theatre tickets. There was a great deal of trivia, a shallow quality to things ... ... You know, that 'I've got rhythm, I've got ...', there's something about it that's not very serious, and at least popular music during our generation began crossing over into an area where it was saying something about the conditions that prevailed.
|
Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
|
The common dogma of fundamentalists is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defence against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity.
|
There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
|
The brakes were useless, the car was wandering. The rear end was coming around. I jammed it down into Low, but it made no difference so I straightened it out and braced for a serious impact, a crash that would probably kill me.
'My heart was full of joy as I took the first hit, which was oddly soft and painless. No real shock at all...
Yes. These huge white lumps were not boulders. They were sheep.
|
The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history; conviction results from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the other body considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the accused from office.
|
Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.
|
Current standards do not do enough to protect the public from serious health dangers associated with this form of pollution.
|
I never smile when I have a bat in my hands. That's when you've got to be serious. When I get out on the field, nothing's a joke to me. I don't feel like I should walk around with a smile on my face.
|