America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. ...The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.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 »
In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control.... Compa...red to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and "charitable" acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control--"indoctrinatio...n" we might say--exercised through the mass media.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of Stat...es. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to deve...lop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entir...e system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You and I ... are convinced of the fact that if our Government in Washington and in a majority of the States should revert to the ...control of those who frankly put property ahead of human beings instead of working for human beings under a system of government which recognizes property, the nation as a whole would again be in a bad situation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Often the words "authority" and "power" are used interchangeably. We do so when we call government officials "the authorities." Bu...t often again, authority and power are distinguished, as when we say that a government official lacked the authority to engage in some venture. In English the root of authority is "author"; the connotation is that authority involves something productive. Yet the word "authoritarian" is used to describe a person or system which is repressive.... Of authority it may be said in the most general way that it is an attempt to interpret the conditions of power, to give the conditions of control and influence a meaning by defining an image of strength. The quest is for a strength that is solid, guaranteed, stable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of t...he hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »