Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
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It seems to me that it is these extremists who are advocating a soft approach. Their oversimplifications and their baseless generalizations reflect the softness of those who cannot bear to face the burdens of a continuing struggle against a powerful and resourceful enemy. A truly tough approach, in my judgment, is one which accepts the challenge of communism with the courage and determination to meet it with every instrumentality of foreign policypolitical and economic as well as military, and with the willingness to see the struggle through as far into the future as may be necessary. Those who seek to meet the challengeor, in reality, to evade itby bold adventures abroad and witch hunts at home are the real devotees of softnessthe softness of seeking escape from painful realities by resort to illusory panaceas.
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Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - 'which is the mostest? which is the leastest?' They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
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The beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree living its own life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those who have been so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild piquancy of its fruit is unrivaled, but in the great question of quantity as human food wild apples are found wanting. Man, therefore, takes the tree from the woods, manures and prunes and grafts,plans and guesses, adds a little of this and that, selects and rejects, until apples of every conceivable size and softness are produced, like nut galls in response to the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard apples are to me the most eloquent words that culture had ever spoken, but they reflect no imperfection upon Nature's spicy crab.
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A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner, neither do uninterrupted prosperity and success qualify for usefulness and happiness. The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill and fortitude or the voyager. The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism worth a lifetime of softness and security.
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We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
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Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.
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We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
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Beauty has often overpowered the resolutions of the firm, and the reasonings of the wise, roused the old to sensibility, and subdued the rigorous to softness
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To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
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The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
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Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
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Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.
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There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.
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I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.
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