For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us..., like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town... steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of thin...gs today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic, and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a human being, goddamn it, my life has value.' So I want ...you to get up now, I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on;... But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wonder if it's ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens? D'ya suppose it's ethical even if you prove that he... didn't commit a crime? I'm not much on rear window ethics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »