Perspectives on Ideas. April 27, 2007.

Discussion
Discussion 414 Cicero: For there can be discussion without contradiction. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

Disease
Disease 235 Chillingworth: A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

Disease 235 Chillingworth: …a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

Doctors
Doctors 64 …for we may lay it down as a maxim, that when a nation abounds in physicians, it grows thin of people. Addison, 3/24/1711. The Spectator.

Doctrine
Doctrine 83 The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. Hoffer, The True Believer

Doctrine 85 The true doctrine is a master key to all the world’s problems. Hoffer, The True Believer

Dogmatism
Dogmatic 260 …with bigness there often emerges a dogmatic rigidity. Eiseley, The Star Thrower

Dogmatism 263 The dogmatisms of each age wear out. E. Hamilton. The Greek Way

Doublespeak
Doublespeak 206 Hitler: …after a critical diagnosis incurable persons may be granted a mercy death. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.

Doublespeak 211 Race and Resettlement Office…responsible for the ‘racial’ purification of the Reich…. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.

Doublespeak 312 …Keitel corrected the sentence with his customary purple pencil: “I did not say shoot[;] I said turn over to the Secret Police.” Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.

Doublespeak 472 Jackson: They all speak with Nazi double-talk…in the Nazi dictionary of sardonic euphemisms ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem was a phrase that meant extermination; ‘special treatment’ of prisoners of war meant killing; ‘protective custody’ meant concentration camps. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.

Doublespeak 298 W.H. Auden: When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook

Doubt
Doubt 1197 The purest saints that I have ever known were long, very long, in darkness and in doubt. Emerson, Uncollected Prose.

Drama
Drama 423 Nietzsche…believes that our pleasure in the tragic drama…is a refined and vicarious cruelty. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.

Drama 109 Thornton Wilder: [The theater should be...] experience for experience’s sake--rather than for moral improvement’s sake. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.

Drama 110 Thornton Wilder: ...a dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and countershocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.

Drama 241 Johnson: …it is regarded as a kind of dramatic impiety to maintain that virtue should not be rewarded, nor vice punished in the last scene of the last act of every tragedy…[but] labors in vain to inculcate a doctrine in theory, which everyone knows to be false, vis., that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness; and vice of misery. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Drama 483 The curate: …because the public after seeing a well-written and well-constructed play, would come away delighted by the comic part, instructed by the serious, intrigued by the plot, enlivened by the witty quips, warned by the tricks, edified by the moral, incensed against vice, and enamored of virtue. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Part One: 1605.

Drama 120 And as the principal design of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end, if we always make virtue and innocence happy and successful. Addison, 4/16/1711. The Spectator.

Drama 399 Euripides: These wholesome habits, then, of thought/ To this democracy I taught:/ I showed them logic on the stage/ Till logic now is all the rage. Aristophanes, Frogs.

Drama 1 Aristophanes created his own world and populated it with his own people, as a god might do. Hadas, ed., The Complete Works of Aristophanes.