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"Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech."
Standard
Customized
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"Retro is a symptom of a generation that is too lazy to innovate."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hungry for more food, status, or money, yet really we are hungry for connection."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all."
Author Name
Personal Development

"To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Confession. Years ago, I was invited to a cocktail party for an Asian-American networking group. As I introduced myself to a Japanese businessman, I reached out and firmly shook his hand. Much to my embarrassment now, I automatically took my other hand and wrapped our hands in a "hand hug. This is a common gesture of friendship in the South. As his wife approached, however, she appeared appalled and felt disrespected that I was touching her husband. Our cultural differences were marked. Despite this cultural mishap, I was able to redeem myself. We all moved past it and delighted in an interesting conversation. Physical touch is a touchy topic (pun intended), especially when various cultures are involved."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The nation that honors a dancer more than a scholar is no more a nation."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves - and other animals."
Author Name
Personal Development

"We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture-and, in the process, we don't allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds."
Author Name
Personal Development

"High fives and fist bumps have become the popular alternatives to traditional handshakes, especially among the younger generations. As a new social norm, they are used as a greeting, an approval, an acknowledgement, a celebration, and a gesture of understanding. High fives and fist bumps are also viewed as a healthier alternative to traditional handshakes because they don't spread germs."
Author Name
Personal Development

"On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."
Time

"No one wants advice - only corroboration."
Advice

"Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it."
Heritage

"Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true."
Life

"Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels."
Greed

"There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty."
Truth

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
Creativity

"If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar."
Storytelling

"It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings."
Life

"And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder."
War
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