“Commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: Standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially commonplace information.”

Commencement address at University of Iowa.
Commencement address, University of Iowa http://www.bartleby.com/63/48/2748.html, Time (June 19, 1965)

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W. Willard Wirtz 1
American Secretary of Labor 1912–2010

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“In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety.”

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Context: In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

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“You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Quoted in Herbert V. Prochnow (1955), Speaker's Book of Epigrams and Witticisms
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“Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.”

An Wang (1920–1990) American businessman

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“Growth is a good thing, up to about seven feet tall, then it starts to get inconvenient.  People eight feet tall bang their heads, their backs ache, their circulation slows, they spend more for food and clothes, and when they fall it really hurts.  Who can they make love to? ---The same is true of cities.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.paulglover.org/8709.html (“What’s Next for Ithaca?”), The Grapevine, cover story, 1987-09-15
Context: “Growth is a good thing, up to about seven feet tall, then it starts to get inconvenient.  People eight feet tall bang their heads, their backs ache, their circulation slows, they spend more for food and clothes, and when they fall it really hurts.  Who can they make love to? ---The same is true of cities.  After a certain size they get more frustrating than exciting: People collide and anger turns to crime.  Streets become dangerous, housing costs more, tax rates rise, schools teach less, structures dwarf people, air smells stale, water fouls and traffic slows no matter how wide the roads.”

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