A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.
If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.
In about 9th grade, an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school, so I did on a whim. I got accepted. Then I got accepted at the Julliard School, and by then, I was serious about it.
I'd studied English literature and American history, but the English literature, which I thought was going to be helpful to me in an immediate way, was the opposite. So I had to un-think a lot of things and move out of my own head, and I learned a lot. It was like graduate school, but an un-graduate school or an un-school.
You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.
I wasn't very good at school and appalling at English.
But there's a lot of them that had that exact reaction, who had never heard Trump speak before. And I remember when I said this after [Donald] Trump's speech, I had a lot of emails. "Come, Rush! It's not... People aren't that segregated anymore." Don't doubt me on this. The left, you do not know how they sequester themselves.
I don't want the values of others being imposed on my children in my school, and I don't think that should be happening in a public school or a private school.
Active liberty is particularly at risk when law restricts speech directly related to the shaping of public opinion, for example, speech that takes place in areas related to politics and policy-making by elected officials. That special risk justifies especially strong pro-speech judicial presumptions. It also justifies careful review whenever the speech in question seeks to shape public opinion, particularly if that opinion in turn will affect the political process and the kind of society in which we live.
I loved Old School. I thought Old School was very different than a lot of the comedies that had come out. And that character I liked. I tried to ground him very much in reality and play him very much finding things important to him that are somewhat ridiculous.
I loved Old School. I thought Old School was very different than a lot of the comedies that had come out. And that character I liked. I tried to ground him very much in reality and play him very much [as] finding things important to him that are somewhat ridiculous.
The English treatment of the Irish was appalling. It was absolutely appalling.
I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.
I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time, to say high Anglo-Catholic would be a real English understatement.
Modesty means to be free from undue familiarity, from indecency, from lewdness, pure in thought and conduct. Speaking of modest apparel, it means decent, seemly. The opposite of modesty is conceit, boldness, immodesty, brazenness, lewdness.
Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.