American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
History had been man’s effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man’s ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.
The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.
The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.
What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?
Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.
When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.
Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus.
An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator’s power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future.
By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.
Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery.
A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off each other.
Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined – even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness – to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.