In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance.... When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures--finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding--we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am looking over Self Control again, & my opinion is confirmed of its being an excellently-meant, elegantly-written... Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To make life more bearable and pleasant for everybody, choose the issues that are significant enough to fight over, and ignore or ...use distraction for those you can let slide that day. Picking your battles will eliminate a number of conflicts, and yet will still leave you feeling in control.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To try to control a nine-month-old's clinginess by forcing him away is a mistake, because it counteracts a normal part of the chil...d's development. To think that the child is clinging to you because he is spoiled is nonsense. Clinginess is not a discipline issue, at least not in the sense of correcting a wrongdoing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't believe there is one woman within the confines of this state who does not believe in birth control. I never met one. That ...is, I never met one who thought that she should be kept in ignorance of contraceptive methods. Many I have met who valued the knowledge they possessed, but thought there were certain other classes who would be better kept in ignorance. The old would protect the young. The rich would keep the poor in ignorance. The good would keep their knowledge from the bad, the strong from the weak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the black girls didn't get these pills because their black ministers were up on the pulpit saying that birth control pills wer...e black genocide. What I'm saying is that black men have exploited black women.... They didn't want them to have any choice about their reproductive health. And if you can't control your reproduction, you can't control your life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have ... succeeded in enlightening public opinion. We have battered down the prejudice of the press. We have overcome the apath...y and passive indifference of the medical profession. We have awakened the consciousness of the Protestant churches and their ethical leaders to the moral necessity of birth control. Yet this enlightenment, unless directed and applied, will be extinguished by the winds of dogmas unless it is applied like a hydro-electric power to the driving of the machinery of political and legislative action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't really know how most of my ventures in this work were ever financed. I am of no economical turn of mind. I do things first..., and somehow or another they get paid for. If I had waited to finance my various battles for birth control, I do not suppose they ever would have become realities. I suppose here is the real difference between the idealist--or the "fanatic, as we are called--and the ordinary "normal" human being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... only a controlled fertility in human beings can maintain any progress. No system of society depending for its continuation on ...intelligent humans can stand long unless it encourages the control of the birth rate and includes contraceptive knowledge as a right. Without it no system, no matter what its ideals, can withstand the overpowering force of uncontrolled, unrestricted fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... an abortion is only horrible, but to deny life is satanic. Why then, I wonder, do priests and nuns remain unmarried? Why then ...are celibacy and self-control approved and exacted? What a priceless ideal for mothers to follow! To continue bearing children misshapen, deformed, hideous to the eyes, in the hope that Heaven may be filled! It's a monstrous doctrine, abhorrent of every civilized instinct in us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »