`` They knew I was a good sharecrop farmer back in Carolina, but out West was a chance to build a real farm of our own.

Unlike so many of the power-starved intellectuals in underdeveloped nations of our own day, they commanded both prestige and influence before the Revolution started.

We, in our country, think of war as an external threat which, if it occurs, will not be primarily of our own doing.

Our most elemental and unavoidable impressions, he says, are those of being involved in a large arena of powers which have a longer past than our own, which are interrelated in a vast movement through the present toward the future.

We must believe we have the ability to affect our own destinies: otherwise why try anything??

If we cannot stop warfare in our own economic system, how can we expect to abolish it internationally??

We are tempted to blame others for our problems rather than look them straight in the face and realize they are of our own making and possible of solution only by ourselves with the help of desperately needed, enlightened, competent leaders.

But a modern Oedipus who is doomed because he cannot oppose his own childhood is only pathetic, and for renouncing the mystery in favor of psychological truth he gives up the claim on our sympathies.

He and also Mr. Cowley and Mr. Warren have fallen to the temptation which besets many of us to read into our authors -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, and Herman Melville -- protests against modernism, material progress, and science which are genuine protests of our own but may not have been theirs.

As things turned out, however, we have not profited greatly from the lesson: instead of persistently following a national program of our own we have often been satisfied to be against whatever Soviet policy seemed to be at the moment.

Although we continue to pay our conversational devotions to `` free private enterprise '', `` individual initiative '', `` the democratic way '', `` government of the people '', `` competition of the marketplace '', etc., we live rather comfortably in a society in which economic competition is diminishing in large areas, bureaucracy is corroding representative government, technology is weakening the citizen's confidence in his own power to make decisions, and the threat of war is driving him economically and physically into the ground ''.

With these we shape our destiny and own private property, and that, sir, makes ours the best of all possible societies.

Not for a moment do we forget that our own fate is firmly fastened to that of these countries ; ;

Continuing deficits of anything like this magnitude would, over time, impair our own economic growth and check the forward progress of the Free World.

I cannot express to you the depth of my conviction that, in our own and free world interest, we must co-operate with others to help these people achieve their legitimate ambitions, as expressed in their different multi-year plans.

In his study Samuel Johnson, Joseph Wood Krutch takes this line when he says that what Aristotle really means by his theory of catharsis is that our evil passions may be so purged by the dramatic ritual that it is `` less likely that we shall indulge them through our own acts ''.

If a broader Atlantic community is to be formed -- and my own judgment is that it lies within the realm of both our needs and our capacity -- a ready nucleus of machinery is at hand in the NATO alliance.

The danger lay not in believing that our own A-bombs would deter Russia's use of hers ; ;

And until this protection is at least as concrete as, say, the row of hotels that bars us from our own sands at Miami Beach, those who represent us all should agree to nothing.

And here all the time you knew the Sioux would be using our rifles on them!!

`` Maybe in time to make a cross and dig our graves ''.

It was our hope to educate him and to give him his freedom when the right time came, for he was a bright and friendly youth who seemed worthy of our interest.

But now we can keep it out no longer, because we have come into a time when `` it invades our experience at every moment.

If we remove ourselves for a moment from our time and our infatuation with mental disease, isn't there something absurd about a hero in a novel who is defeated by his infantile neurosis??

It would be profitable, I believe, to read these realistic humorists alongside Faulkner's works, the thought being not that he necessarily read them and owed anything to them directly, but rather that they dealt a hundred years ago with a class of people and a type of life which have continued down to our time, to Faulkner's time.

No matter how earnest is our quest for guaranteed peace, we must maintain a high degree of military effectiveness at the same time we are engaged in negotiating the issue of arms reduction.

`` It is no time '', he writes, `` to talk with Hints and Innuendos, but openly and honestly to profess our Sentiments before our Enemies have compleated and put their Designs in Execution against us ''.

Two facets of this aspect of the literary process have special significance for our time.

There is a second feature of the influences of literature, good literature, on emotional life which may have some special value for our time.

A particularly galling phrase was `` O.K., Panyotis, we have time at our disposal ''.

Whether the only price of our redemption were not the death of Christ on the cross, with the rest of his sufferings and obediences, in the time of his life here, after he was born of the Virgin Mary??

It is as if we, in our center of human observation, from time to time penetrate more deeply into the unknown.

According to the original program, Premier Khrushchev expected the millions looking toward the Kremlin this morning to be filled with admiration or rage -- depending upon individual or national politics -- because of the `` bold program for building communism in our time '' which the Congress will adopt.

Since the goal of our international planners is a World Government, this Atlantic Community would mark a giant step in that direction for, once American economic autonomy is absorbed, a larger grouping is a question of time.

Even apart from the fact that now at the age of 31 my personal life is being totally disrupted for the second time for no very compelling reason -- I cannot help looking around at the black leather jacket brigades standing idly on the street corners and in the taverns of every American city and asking myself if our society has gone mad.

That is why our creative people give their time to literature, not to painting or sculpture ''.

You may stay as long as you wish, of course, but if arranging for the care of the girls must take time into account, I think a day or two should be enough to finish our business in ''.

Before we get through he'll have the Blackfeet hankerin' for our hair and our goods.

As I dug in behind one of the bales we were using as protection, I grudgingly found myself agreeing with Oso's logic, especially when I imagined what would have happened to Missy if Old Knife's large party of screeching warriors had overrun our company.

I was aware that when our eyes met we both quickly averted them.

Something clicked in this instance, but I treated her circumspectly and I felt that she knew it, for we both kept our distance.

I dismissed these feelings as wishful thinking but I could not get it out of my head that we had a strong physical attraction for one another and we both feared to dwell on it because of our relationship.

But in our case -- and neither my wife nor I have extreme views on integration, nor are we given to emotional outbursts -- the situation has ruined one or two valued friendships and come close to wrecking several more.

`` we the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America ''.

We have staved off a war and, since our behavior has involved all these elements, we can only keep adding to our ritual without daring to abandon any part of it, since we have not the slightest notion which parts are effective.

We are forced, in our behavior towards others, to adopt empirically successful patterns in toto because we have such a minimal understanding of their essential elements.

hot-colored verbenas in the corner between the dining-room wall and the side porch, where we passed on our way to the pump with the half-gourd tied to it as a cup by my grandmother for our childish pleasure in drinking from it.

When these had been pocketed, we could still spend a morning cracking open other pebbles for our delight in seeing how much prettier they were inside than their dull exteriors indicated.

Squatting on our haunches beside the flat stone we broke them on, we were safe behind the high closed gates at the end of the drive: safe from interruption and the observation and possible amusement of the passers-by.

We were forbidden to swing on the gates, lest they sag on their hinges in a poor-white-trash way, but we could stand on them, when they were latched, rest our chins on the top, and stare and stare, committing to memory, quite unintentionally, all the details that lay before our eyes.

But the fences were still in place fifty-odd years ago, and when we stood on the gate to look over, the sidewalk under our eyes was not cement but two rows of paving stones with grass between and on both sides.

We hear equally fervent concern over the belief that we have not enough generalists who can see the over-all picture and combine our national skills and knowledge for useful purposes.