Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the prohibition of alcohol, suggesting it is an unreasonable law. It reflects a belief in understanding human nature over rigid societal dictates.
F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses his view as a fiction writer, emphasizing that he does not consider himself an expert in political science. He argues against the prohibition of liquor, deeming it a foolish law, and notes that many writers who care about human welfare share his sentiments. This perspective highlights the tension between legal restrictions and the complexities of human behavior.
In practice
During a panel discussion on the impact of legislation on society.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness
There's nothing I did wrong. I was just born in North Korea, and that was my crime.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
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