Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the "dragon," in their eff...orts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this ...theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the gree...d of gold and all unloveliness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its... fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their n...ext look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And men left down their work and came, And women with petticoats coloured like flame.... And little bare feet that were blue with cold, Went dancing back to the age of gold, And all the world went gay, went gay, For half an hour in the street to-day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »