The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates--the inhabitants of marketing zones in the con...sumer goods society, television audiences and news magazine readerships... vote with money at the cash counter rather than with the ballot paper at the polling booth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The advantage man enjoys, which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter... to his destiny as a male. Through his identification of phallus and transcendence, it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile prestige. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject. It is this conflict that especially marks the situation of the emancipated woman. She refuses to confine herself to her role as female, because she will not accept mutilation; but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex. Man is a human being with sexuality; woman is a complete individual, equal to the male, only if she too is a human being with sexuality. To renounce her femininity is to renounce a part of her humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sad...e. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrim...onious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... ...One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from... each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality--counter-moves in the same game; forms of idl...eness at bottom identical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good government cannot be found on the bargain-counter. We have seen samples of bargain-counter government in the past when low ta...x rates were secured by increasing the bonded debt for current expenses or refusing to keep our institutions up to the standard in repairs, extensions, equipment, and accommodations. I refuse, and the Republican Party refuses, to endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »