The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one si...de won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of o...urs. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography.... For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which ... you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviousl...y much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these ...were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that ...is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, ep...idemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma.... (We had to witness) wars ... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities ... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations).... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of ... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases ... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do ...something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is the Christianity of tenderness. But ... it is utterly pushed aside by the Christianity of self-glorification: the self-gl...orification of the humble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »