America Italiana Quotes & Sayings

When theories of values do not afford intellectual assistance in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate to direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intelligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure of immediate circumstance, self-interest and class-interest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking, and they tend to take the place of intelligence. — John Dewey

London is not a healthy place. I feel much healthier when I'm living in the countryside or, indeed, anywhere out of London. When I go back to the countryside to visit my mother, I get out of the car, and suddenly there's great wafts of fresh air. — Honeysuckle Weeks

We, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness. (p184) — Benjamin Hale

Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from the pit's mouth or mill-gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best ... [They] are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality ... They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are descendants of those who always stayed behind. — Edward Alsworth Ross

Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you've ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars. — Daniel James Brown

Fools through false shame, conceal their open wounds. — Horace

I wasn't an overbearing child. But I was aggressive. I always managed to get what I wanted somehow. — Kristy Swanson

God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand. — Michel De Montaigne

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. — H.L. Mencken