The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all a...ges and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Folk Art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without ...the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying.... Folk Art was the people's own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters' High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion... as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimon...y to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Measured by any standard known to science--by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape,--the tension and vibration and volu...me and so-called progression of society were full a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800;Mthe force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time. No law of material movement applied to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of s...hapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism... is an indispensable element of culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and... a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first year was critical to my assessment of myself as a person. It forced me to realize that, like being married, having child...ren is not an end in itself. You don't at last arrive at being a parent and suddenly feel satisfied and joyful. It is a constantly reopening adventure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »