The relation of the soul to the body is like that of a house to its bricks. The soul is a principle of organisation, which governs... the flesh and endows it with meaning. It is no more separable from the flesh than is the house from its bricks, even if the soul may survive the gradual replacement of every bodily part.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
States are more like people than they are like anything else: they exist by purpose, reason, suffering, and joy. And peace between... states is also like peace between people. It involves the willing renunciation of purpose, in the mutual desire not to do, but to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with w...hat preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are both... forms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fantasy consists in a morbid fascination with unrealities, which secretly transforms itself into a desire to make them real. Imagi...nation is a form of intellectual control, which presents us with the image of unrealities in order that we should understand and feel distanced from them. In imagination we dominate; in fantasy, we are dominated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac sme...lls testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter..., but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Terrorists often claim to be fighting wars, and to be doing no more than is necessary in war. This is nonsense. War is certainly t...he natural expression of collective resentment; but it occurs between organised groups and is fought openly, against a collective enemy. It is possible to fight a war with undiminished respect for the rights of the enemy individual. Indeed, that is the duty of every soldier. But the terrorist must disregard this duty and disobey the law of war. His feelings towards the individual are abolished by his loathing of the group, and it is this--rather than his cowardice, cruelty, or intemporate hate--that constitutes his true moral corruption.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »