Relationships and Family

The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the slaves of their households. They no longer rise when an elder enters the room, they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up the dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize over their pedagogues.

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

She has always been there, my darling.

She has always been there, my darling.

Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift . . . that’s nausea.

[ Of a girl before marriage :] As an apple reddens on the high bough; high atop the highest bough the apple pickers passed it by—no, not passed it by, but they could not reach it.

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing. This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near to death.

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing. This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near to death.

The first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attains years of discretion.

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.

On this tenth day of June 1940 the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue .

In a month, in a year, how will we bear that so many seas separate me from you?

Je l’ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!

“My uncle always was respected;

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

[ On being told at a party that people were ducking for apples :] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.

The kids, like all kids, loved the dog [Checkers], and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

The kids, like all kids, loved the dog [Checkers], and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.