Philosophers From The United States

"I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation."

"If you type adeptly with 10 fingers, you’re typing faster than your mind is working."

"I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains."

"The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east."

"About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America."

"The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you."

"The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination."

"Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression."

"I was surprised when shortly after New Year's Day of 1983, the Governor of Texas summoned me to his office, because I hadn't been aware that he knew I was in town."

"If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home."

"Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries."

"For some time now they had been suspicious of him."

"Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door."

"Youth is truth."

"On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane, "If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn.""

"On a bleak wintry morning some years ago I was summoned to the office of our naval attache at the American embassy in Kabul."

"A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men."

"I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself."

"In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, "But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled.""

"A Pole is a man born with a sword in his right hand, a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to rebuild."

"...the crucial Battle of Zamość, which is not stressed in most current histories because it involved a Polish-Russian battle in which the Poles won."

"Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly."

"Silence, much more powerful than before, much more shot through with the meaning of life and the accumulated wisdom of history."

"He had obtained a clearer view of his homeland by leaving it and seeing it through the eyes of others."

"Leonid Brezhnev needed a haircut, so he went down to the ground floor of the Kremlin and plopped into the chair. It was understood that at such times the barber was to say not a word, just cut hair. But this morning, after a few snips he said: "Comrade Brezhnev what are you going to do about Poland?" No reply. Some minutes later: "Comrade Brezhnev, what about Poland?" Again no reply. Then, pretty soon: "Comrade Brezhnev, you've got to do something about Poland." At this Brezhnev jumps out of the chair and tears away the cloth: "What's all this about Poland?" and the barber says: "It makes my job so much easier," and Brezhnev screams: "What do you mean?" and the barber says: "Every time I mention Poland your hair stands straight up on end.""

"...organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest."

"No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before."

"I don't know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss, but you live with that loss."

"I do believe that everyone growing up faces differential opportunities. With me, it was books and travel and some good teachers. With somebody else, it may be a boy scout master. With somebody else, it will be a clergyman. Somebody else, an uncle who was wiser than the father. I think young people ought to seek that differential experience that is going to knock them off dead center. I was a typical American school boy. I happened to get straight A's and be pretty good in sports. But I had no great vision of what I could be. And I never had any yearning. My job was to live through Friday afternoon, get through the week, and eat something. And then along came these differential experiences that you don't look for, that you don't plan for, but, boy, you better not miss them. The things that make you bigger than you are. The things that give you a vision. The things that give you a challenge."

"Not too many people work in a job where, waiting out there are three or four hundred people who are paid to tear apart what you've done. And often they are brighter than you are, or they know more about the subject than you do, or they wish they had written a book themselves, or done a lot better. Or they just don't like it! And you have to live with it. I have been very well treated by the critics in the long haul."

"Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don't portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope."

"I love Emerson, I just had a problem with something I read in his journal. He was talking about Asians. Chinese, specifically. He said they had no culture to speak of, no music. He said they're not even as good as the Africans, who are at least willing to carry our wood. And he said that they've done nothing useful except manage "to preserve to a hair / for three or four thousand years / the ugliest features in the world." The poem begins by looking at the face of this butcher. So it's about that-it's about countenance, and it's about what the culture defines as beauty or ugliness. It's a weird wrestling I'm doing with Emerson. I can't imagine me without Emerson. And yet there's this thing about him that gets to me. That's deep in the culture."

"What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the potato disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?"

"There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses."

"There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts."

"Modern technics, even apart from the special arts that it fostered, had a cultural contribution to make in its own right. Just as science underlined the respect for fact, so technics emphasized the importance of function: in this domain, as Emerson pointed out, the beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary."

"A cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil."

"Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and represented nothing except intelligence itself."

"I love Emerson, the first great American writer."

"Virtually at the same time as Kierkegaard gave philosophical significance to moods, Emerson was doing the same. In "Experience" he characterized our life experiences as "a train of moods" that color whatever we encounter, and he described life as "a flux of moods" that affect our "states of mind.""

"Emerson's prose is full of poetry, and his poems are light and air. ... His modes of expression, like his epithets, are imaginative."

"We are told of his mode of preparing an essay,—of the slow-growing medley of thoughts on a topic, at last brought out and strung at random, like a child's variegated beads."

"He began where many poets end, seeking at once the upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. ... Emerson was the freest and most ideal of them all, and what came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast he gave like a victor."

"American self-confidence, Emerson argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America's gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the "most un-handsome part of our condition." Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues-it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today. This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices-from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser."

"Even when provocation was great, his satire was so gentle and genial that it warmed even its object."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."

"If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent."

"Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock."

"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."