A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist ec...onomy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom.... Goodbye to all that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From all that dwell below the skies let the Creator's praise arise!... Let the Redeemer's name be sung through every land, by every tongue!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The jazz musician is denied the dignity accorded the composer because not everything he composes is first written down, or, necess...arily, written down afterward, or, once written down, considered immutable. And he is denied the dignity accorded the Serious-music performer because the latter is an "interpreter" of presumably great music. The musician, in other words, who makes up his music as he goes along, or makes up a good deal of it, or who rarely plays the same music twice in the same way, is, we are given to understand, inferior to the musician who makes no music of his own. For all his undisputed virtuosity and inventive fancy, the jazz musician cannot, we are led to believe, be granted equality with the Serious musician who can read and play the notes written down for him by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner a century or so ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance--Beet...hoven's Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance--whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Logic, reason, disease, and the menace of death, these things meant nothing at all to us. We were committed to other values by whi...ch the poet has always lived in defiance of all that society demanded of him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because we cannot control all that our children see, hear, and play, it is tempting to throw up our hands and do nothing. Although... we cannot do everything, we can do something, and this is to talk with our children and teenagers about unexpected encounters with inappropriate violence, sexuality, and profanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his si...lence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his ...unattained but attainable self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is my wish, and may it be the wish of all, that this great building may continue to be to all your population that which it sho...uld be--an edifice opening its doors from night to night, calling your people here away from the care of business to those enjoyments, and pursuits, and entertainments which develop the souls of men, which will have power to inspire those whose lives are heavy with daily toil, and in its magnificent and enchanting presence lift them for a time out of these dull things into those higher things where men should live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under... a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet--the scientific poet--of a new mythology.... Each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant.... They compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »