Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification. . Harold Edmund Stearns
You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.
-
Stewart Onan
Letting go doesn't mean that you don't care about someone anymore. It's just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.
-
Deborah Reber
To love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit...
-
Ellen Bass
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
-
Elizabeth Gilbert
Real isn't how you are made, ' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.''Does it hurt?' asked the...
-
Margery Williams Bianco
More Quotes By Harold Edmund Stearns
We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so.
Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will...
The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual — faith that he can be persuaded...
When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination...
