Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against ou...r souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the publi...c be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The "marketing" immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of of...ficious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defence-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.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 »
No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, ...such as cars that won't start.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 »
When the peace is a trade route, figures For the budget, reduction of population,... Life grown sullen and immense Lusts after immunity to pain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »