"It isnt surprising that many children consider their parents to be a little dim, and that they sometimes try to update them. The fact that they dont usually try too hard is just as well; a thoroughly updated parent is an unappetizing sight."
Ruth Eleanor "Peg" Bracken was an American writer of humorous books on cooking, housekeeping, etiquette and travel.
"When I finally gathered, invented, stole, simplified, borrowed, and found a publisher for a clutch of reasonably foolproof recipes, I learned I had friends I hadnt known about—more proof that a mutual dislike can be quite as sound a basis for friendship as a mutual devotion."
"There are worse things than being fat, and one of them is worrying about it all the time."
"The subject of men and women is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be."
"When people say its a funny thing about them, you will probably be able to control your hysterics. They are only getting ready to announce the shattering fact that they dont like something. And its not going to be something thats really quite awful, like suttee or apartheid; its going to be something small."
"Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies. My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they cant possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover, I cant give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I can only talk about it, and they neednt listen."
"If the author is so interested in Science, why doesnt she take a course in it?"
"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"