Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they ...sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like som...e plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal.... No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out the still night--the... first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.... The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every so often, I turn on the television and see one of the movement leaders being asked some idiot question like, "Isn't the wome...n's movement in favor of all women abandoning their children and going off to work?" ... the leader usually replies that the movement isn't in favor of all women doing anything right; what the movement is about, she says, is options. She is right, of course. At its best, that is exactly what the movement is about. But it just doesn't work out that way. Because the hardest thing for us to accept is the right to those options. I hear myself saying these words: what this movement is about is options. I say it to my friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I am really thinking is, if you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conventions, at the present moment, are really menaced. The most striking sign of this is that people are now making unconventiona...lity a social virtue, instead of an unsocial vice. The switches have been opened, and the laden trains must take their chance of a destination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For above all, pornography is ritual. It is an enacted drama that is laden with meaning, which imparts a vision of the world. The ...altar for the ritual is a woman's body. And the ritual which is carried out on this altar is the desecration of flesh. Here, what is sacred within the body is degraded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »