Weekend Words: Center
Can the Republican Party find a Savior from the Center?
According to an Election Day post-mortem in the New York Times, leaders of the Republican party are scrambling for ways to limit the influence of its hard-right wing and regain the political middle ground. But can it find a Savior from the Center?
“America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”
—Norman Mailer
“However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet.”
—John Guare
“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”
—Guy Debord
“I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at the center.”
—Dwight Eisenhower
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.”
—Harold Brodkey
“Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.”
—Victor Hugo
“At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.”
—Martin Luther King
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
—William Butler Yeats
“If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?”
—Richard Milhous Nixon
