America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have... lived in a cave and worn skins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo- a...nd heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, th...e archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gaze implies a concentration of the spectator's activity into that of looking, the glance implies that no extraordinary effort... is being invested in the activity of looking. The very terms we habitually use to designate the person who watches TV or the cinema screen tend to indicate this difference. The cinema-looker is a spectator: caught by the projection yet separate from its illusion. The TV looker is a viewer, casting a lazy eye over proceedings, keeping an eye on events, or, as the slightly archaic designation had it, "looking in."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as ...a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of "quaint," and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal, ...has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The clause which lived twenty-four hours in the Alabama Constitution, granting to taxpaying women owning $500 worth of property th...e suffrage on questions of bonded indebtedness, was killed by a disease peculiar to the genus homo known as chivalry. In the case in point, the diagnosis revealed that the fairest, purest and brightest jewels that ever shone under the brilliant rays of God's shining sun would be immeasurably lowered by voting upon questions relating to the taxation of their own property. Yet, under the vagaries of this disease, this same convention conferred on husbands the right to vote on their wives' property. This is the same character of chivalry which gives the wages of the brightest, fairest jewels to the husband, which makes impossible equal pay for equal work and which classes the jewels with the idiots, insane and criminals in that and other States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Regna regnis lupi, The State is a wolf unto the State. It is not a pessimistic lamentation like the old homo homini lupus [Man is ...a wolf to Man], but a positive creed and political ideal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »