We are told to maintain constitutions because they are constitutions, and what is laid down in those constitutions?... Certain gre...at fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and ... all laws of man's making which trample on these ideas, are null and void--wrong to obey, right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States recognizes human slavery; and makes the souls of men articles of purchase and of sale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption...; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was not sufficient for the disquiet of our minds that we disputed at the end of seventeen hundred years upon the articles of ou...r own religion, but we must likewise introduce into our quarrels those of the Chinese. This dispute, however, was not productive of any great disturbances, but it served more than any other to characterize that busy, contentious, and jarring spirit which prevails in our climates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are several natural phenomena which I shall have to have explained to me before I can keep on going as a resident member of ...the human race. One is the metamorphosis which hats and suits undergo exactly one week after their purchase, whereby they are changed from smart, intensely becoming articles of apparel into something children use when they want to "dress up like daddy."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a lady of wealth, is seen roaming about in search of cheaper articles, or trying to beat down a shopkeeper, or making a close... bargain with those she employs, the impropriety is glaring to all minds. A person of wealth has no occasion to spend time in looking for extra cheap articles; her time could be more profitably employed in distributing to the wants of others. And the practice of beating down tradespeople, is vulgar and degrading, in any one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in na...tureto Berenice--although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolis...h and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of Labourers' Unions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas wi...ll extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things--like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to be...d and sleep quiet afterward. All his prayers begin with "Now I lay me down to sleep," and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his "long rest." He has consented to perform certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of any new-fangled ones; he does n't wish to have any supplementary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the present time. He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit as well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »