The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing... under the sun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, ne...ver to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukrainian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can't do it. And because I'm a writer and teacher, I don't understand how Europe's most cultured nation could have done that. For these men who killed with submachine-guns in the Ukraine were university graduates. Afterwards they would go home and read a poem by Heine. So what happened?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Liberalism is too often misconceived as a new set of dogmas taught by a newer and better set of priests called "liberals." Liberal...ism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas--an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives.... Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television was far more pervasive and radicalizing than printing had been. It was massive. When Riesman and others spoke of books,... magazines, and radio as mass media, they could not imagine the size and shape of television. There never had been a medium that could reach everybody, and reach them with images of behavior as behavior without the rationalization of words. The audience for its programs was drawn from every social class and every social element. By the mere act of watching television, a heterogeneous society could engage in a purely homogeneous activity. Television images are more rapid and transient than the printed word. They make no demand on us to remember or reflect on them. This impermanence and the time of consumption cause us to spend extended hours with the medium but significantly less time with any one image or sequence of images. Television is instantaneous and simultaneous: Everyone gets the message at the same time and, at the same time that an event is happening. There is no lag time between a reporter witnessing an event and reporting it, and no time for reflection and analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I never thought of anything but a long full life with my love, but a heavy foreboding hit me about two years into this planned ...bliss, when he said firmly that we must never go back to the fishing village where we had spent our first Christmas. And a cruel mixture of disbelief and sadness filled me as I came to understand how thoroughly and firmly he stood by his conviction, that if people know real happiness anywhere, they must never expect to find it there again.... So that year we went to Nuremberg, and the next year Strasbourg and and and, but we never returned to any place we had been before, because once, according to his private calendar, we had been there. And in a few more years we parted. You might say that we ran out of places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it alo...ud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it--although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a man who exists as one of the most popular objects of leadership, legislation, and quasi-literature in the history of al...l men.... This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone to understood. He has never been listened to.... That man is Black and alive in white America where the media of communication do not allow the delivery of his own voice, his own desires, his own rage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there--all through ...history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organise ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I take enormous pleasure every time I see something that I've done that cannot be wiped out. In some way ... I guess it's a protes...t against mortality. But it's been so much fun! It's the curiosity that drives me. It's making a difference in the world that prevents me from ever giving up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, an...d save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »