System Reply

Famous quotes containing the words system and/or reply:

    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    So, having no reply to give
    To what the old man said,
    I cried, ‘Come, tell me how you live!’
    And thumped him on the head.
    Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)