Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.
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"The Thud of Ideas," The New Yorker (1950-09-23)E. B. White (Elwyn Brooks)
» E. B. White (Elwyn Brooks) - all quotes »
I most earnestly beg you to spare no trouble or necessary expense in getting these.
Henry Knox
[M]others of large families (who claim to common sense)
Will find a Tiger well repay the trouble and expense.Hilaire Belloc
I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things. Lecturing to children is no answer to delinquency. Preaching won't keep youngsters out of trouble, but keeping their minds occupied will.
Walt Disney
Consider what kind of authority [can be ascribed to] any principle which it open to us to choose to regard as authoritative or not. I may choose for example to observe a regimen of asceticism and fasting ... for reasons of health ... What authority such principles possess derives from the reasons for my choice. Insofar as they are good reasons, the principles have corresponding authority; insofar as they are not, the principles are to that same extent deprived of authority. It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority. I might indeed adopt such a principle from whim or caprice or from some arbitrary purpose ... but if I then chose to abandon the principle whenever it suited me, I would be entirely free to do so.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.
Benjamin Graham
White, E. B. (Elwyn Brooks)
White, Edmund
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