Whatever else it may be--stimulus, tranquilizer, aural nipple, too of executives, Muzak is basically trivializing. It is not simpl...y that it relegates music to the province of wallpaper. Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself. Mozart was entirely amenable to such films as Elvira Madigan and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote aptly for The Invaders, Arnold Bax for Oliver Twist, Sergei Prokofiev for Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich for others. In such uses, music collaborates with artists, it becomes an art among arts. But Muzak collaborates chiefly with management: it is used as an aural smoke-screen, a form of jamming, a hormone in the henhouse, an emollient in cemeteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in th...e slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack ... to the feast, from the conversation at the local café to the speech at a formal dinnerLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for ...a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This has been illustrated copiously each day with photographs taken by the author, reproduced by means of cuts such as only French... newspaper-engravers can make, presumably etched on pieces of bread.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sad...e. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and ...crooked as individuals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous a...nd idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it i...nto the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, "That is all there was!" But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In those hours when history becomes terrible, it is as if the soul of woman seizes the moment and tries to set an example for the ...soul of man ... the soul of the French woman is really a heroic blend of family and homeland.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »