A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in... the past was in any important way better than life today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercia...ls, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator--the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The social kiss is an exchange of insincerity between two combatants on the field of social advancement. It places hygiene before ...affection and condescension before all else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex ...and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the futu...re which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future--with a shopping center for twice the population, with a school building already built, with churches constructed, with parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. These were as essential to building a suburb as the prematurely grand hotel had been to building a city in the wilderness. In large developments where the developer had a plan, and even in the smaller developments, there was a new kind of paternalism: not the quasi-feudal paternalism of the company town, nor the paternalism of the utopian ideologue. This new kind of paternalism was fostered by the American talent for organization, by the rising twentieth century American standard of living, and by the American genius for mass production. It was the paternalism of the market place. The suburban developer, unlike the small-town booster, seldom intended to live in the community he was building. For him community was a commodity, a product to be sold at a profit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is against Stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sens...e on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot functi...on without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »