Work Is A Dull Thing; You Cannot

To Be Prejudiced Is The Privilege Of The Thinking Human Being. ... The Open Mind Is The Empty Mind.

Decades Have A Delusive Edge To Them. They Are Not, Of Course, Really Periods At All, Except As Any Other Ten Years May Be. But We, Looking At Them, Are Caught By The Different Name Each Bears, And Give Them Different Attributes, And Tie Labels On Them, As If They Were Flowers In A Border.

The Ascendancy Over Men's Minds Of The Ruins Of The Stupendous Past, The Past Of History, Legend And Myth, At Once Factual And Fantastic, Stretching Back And Back Into Ages That Can But Be Surmised, Is Half-mystical In Basis. The Intoxication, At Once So Heady And So Devout, Is Not The Romantic Melancholy Engendered By Broken Towers And Mouldered Stones; It Is The Soaring Of The Imagination Into The High Empyrean Where Huge Episodes Are Tangled With Myths And Dreams; It Is The Stunning Impact Of World History On Its Amazed Heirs.

As To The Family, I Have Never Understood How That Fits In With The Other Ideals --or, Indeed, Why It Should Be An Ideal At All. A Group Of Closely Related Persons Living Under One Roof; It Is A Convenience, Often A Necessity, Sometimes A Pleasure, Sometimes The Reverse; But Who First Exalted It As Admirable, An Almost Religious Ideal?

Once You Get To Know Your Neighbors, You Are No Longer Free, You Are All Tangled Up, You Have To Stop And Speak When You Are Out And You Never Feel Safe When You Are In.