American - Critic | August 2, 1865 - July 15, 1933
Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.
Irving Babbitt
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A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.
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The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.
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A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.
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Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.
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To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.
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An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
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If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
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Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.
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If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.
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