Films are seen in large, silent, darkened theaters, where intense light beams are projected from behind toward luminous surfaces i...n front. There is an enforced and anonymous collectivity of the audience because, for any screening, all viewers are physically present at the same time in the relatively enclosed space of the theater. In contrast to this cocoon-like, enveloping situation is the fragmentary, dispersed, and varied nature of television reception. The darkness is dissolved, the anonymity removed.... While the aura of cinema spectatorship produces hypnotic fascination, the atmosphere of television enables just the opposite--because the lights are more likely to be on, one can get up and return, do several things at once, watch casually, talk to other people, or even decide to turn the television off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is t...he rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reason American cars don't sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if y...ou buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That's why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seemed there was a sort of poisoning, an auto-infection of the organisms, so Dr. Krokowski said; it was caused by the disintegr...ation of a substance ... and the products of this disintegration operated like an intoxicant upon the nerve-centres of the spinal cord, with an effect similar to that of certain poisons, such as morphia, or cocaine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my ...proposition. That "savage animal" has not really been "mortified"; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become--divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the Japanese of today when he flocks to tragedies, the laborer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who "submits to" Tristan and Isolde, her will suspended--what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, "cruelty."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The blue sun in his red cockade Walked the United States today,... Taller than any eye could see, Older than any man could be. He caught the flags and the picket-lines Of people, round the auto-works....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits t...o arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-quarters of Lisbon, the country's wise men had found no more efficacious means of ...preventing total ruin than to give the people a fine auto-da-fé.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... you can have a couple of seconds to rest in. I mean seconds. You have about two seconds to wait while the blanker is on the fe...lt drawing the moisture out. You can stand and relax those two seconds--three seconds at most. You wish you didn't have to work in a factory. When it's all you know what to do, that's what you do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »