It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a so...rt of insecurity which some find titillating. If a woman wears a high-heeled shoe it changes the apparent musculature of the leg so that you get an effect of twanging sinew, of tension needing to be released. Her bottom sticks out like an offering. At the same time, the lofty perch is an expression of vulnerability, she is effectively hobbled and unable to escape. There is something arousing about this declaration that she is prepared to sacrifice function for form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a... sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera len...s and the eye both register images--because of their sensitivity to light--at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system ... which is neve...r a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is great; but the... advantages of this law are also greater still than its cost--for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it ...: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unchecked, the tourist will climb over the fence and come right into your house to take pictures of you in your habitat. Cities mi...ndful of tourists have built elaborate "tourist traps" which, luckily, work. Tourists are kept confined to these, and few escape. There is, of course, the type known as the "intrepid tourist." This one has to be watched carefully or he can become most annoying. Little wonder these are so often the target of terrorists. If there is an aspect of benign terror about the tourist, there is also a great deal of tourist in the terrorist. Terrorists travel with only one thing in mind, just like the tourist, and the specifics of places escape them both. Terrorists travel for the purpose of shooting unsuspecting foreigners, just as tourists travel for the purpose of shooting them with a camera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, ...totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for males and females both. Culture as we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy. Deviations from sanctioned, sacred behavior are "gender disorders," "criminality," as well as "sick," "disgusting," and "immoral."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing ...a Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It took nine years, and a great depression, and two wars ending in defeat, and one surrender without war, to break my faith in the... benign power of the press. Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »