Famous quotes containing the words excess, demand and/or function:
“There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the tough guy; today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (18731945)
“The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.”
—George Bernard Shaw (18561950)