It may cost me twenty thousand francs; but for twenty thousand francs, I will have the right to rail against the iniquity of human...ity, and to devote to it my eternal hatred.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to compl...ete it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one's actions but your own... seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact... that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manlin...ess, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing so...ciety for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity--advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers h...imself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this ...theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »