Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business..., he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dungheap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl... unheeded across his face or saliva dribble unstemmed from his mouth--either epileptic or dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden be...neath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proxim...ity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by rea...l deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we ...can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-h...and manner.... Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another--cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Politicians--power itself--are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives.... One sho...uld be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abjectness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the hu...man race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »