|
|
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong. (complacency)
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished. (diplomacy)
The traveler to the United States will do well to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others. (class)
More die in the United States from too much food that from too little. (food and eating)
|
|
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state. (government)
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. (free enterprise)
The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness. (government)
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. (institutions)
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. (leaders and leadersh)
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom. (literary criticism)
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put on the troubled seas of thought. (nonsense)
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth. (majority)
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes. (power)
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose. (politicians and poli)
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. (politicians and poli)
Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums. (multiculturalism)
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not. (money)
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down. (pessimism)
Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization -- the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies. (organization)
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect. (pessimism)
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. (politicians and poli)
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied. (riches)
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much. (twentieth century)
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum. (revolutions and revo)
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man. (twentieth century)
|
