Randolph Bourne
Randolph Bourne
Randolph Silliman Bournewas a progressive writer and "leftist intellectual" born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work "The State," discovered after his death...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth30 May 1886
CountryUnited States of America
Randolph Bourne quotes about
handling
Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious thing.
carving conspiracy convenient niche placing society statue vast
Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has
mistake heart reflection
No matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how many imperfect and jagged - in some places perhaps irreparably - our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.
dimensions collaboration increase
A good discussion increases the dimensions of everyone who takes part.
religious feelings ironic
The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying - indeed a rival of the religious life.
war healthy assertion
One keeps healthy in wartime...by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.
quality may guarding
We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnable, we may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
lying book heaven
Culture, like the kingdom of heaven, lies within us, and not in foreign galleries and books.
slave precaution bourne
We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear.
friendship men half
A man with few friends is only half-developed; there are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot even discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open him.
personality needs power-of-one
A cultivation of the powers of one's personality is one of the greatest needs of life.
war political politics
With the shock of war the state comes into its own again.
art war mean
Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.
motivational people way
All we can ever do in the way of good to people is to encourage them to do good to themselves.