Book Four, Chapter III.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four
“Uniforms ruin every character”
Sketchbook 1946-1949
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Max Frisch 67
Swiss playwright and novelist 1911–1991Related quotes
George Steiner
(1929–2020) American writer
Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 27).
David Brin
(1950) novelist, short story writer
A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war... (2009)
Context: Step back for a minute and note an important piece of psychohistory — that every generation of Americans faced adversaries who called us "decadent cowards and pleasure-seeking sybarites (wimps), devoid of any of the virtues of manhood."
Elsewhere, I mark out this pattern, showing how every hostile nation, leader or meme had to invest in this story, for a simple reason. Because Americans were clearly happier, richer, smarter, more successful and far more free than anyone else. Hence, either those darned Yanks must know a better way of living (unthinkable!)... or else they must have traded something for all those surface satisfactions.
Something precious. Like their cojones. Or their souls. A devil's bargain. And hence — (our adversaries told themselves) — those pathetic American will fold up, like pansies, as soon as you give them a good push.
It is the one uniform trait shown by every* vicious, obstinate and troglodytic enemy of the American Experiment. A wish fantasy that convinced Hitler and Stalin and the others that urbanized, comfortable New Yorkers and Californians and all the rest cannot possibly have any guts, not like real men. A delusion shared by the King George, the plantation-owners, the Nazis, Soviets and so on, down to Saddam and Osama bin Laden. A delusion that our ancestors disproved time and again, decisively — though not without a lot of pain.
Sallustius
Roman philosopher and writer
IX. On Providence, Fate, and Fortune.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
“Once a pallid Vestal
Doubted truth in blue;
Listed red in ruin,
Harried every hue;”
Nathalia Crane
(1913–1998) American writer
"The Vestal" <!-- p. 15 -->
The Janitor's Boy And Other Poems (1924)
Context: p>Once a pallid Vestal
Doubted truth in blue;
Listed red in ruin,
Harried every hue;Barricaded vision,
Garbed herself in sighs;
Ridiculed the birthmarks
Of the butterflies.</p
Rutherford B. Hayes
(1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)
Diary (13 July 1879)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)
Laws of Motion, I
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
“Every time I've built character, I've regretted it.”
Bill Watterson
(1958) American comic artist
Source: The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes