... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding o...f that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is a dangerous trend observable in some quarters of the Movement to program Sapphire out of her "evil" ways into a cover...-up, shut-up, lay-back-and-be-cool obedience role. She is being assigned an unreal role of mute servant that supposedly neutralizes the acidic tension that exists between Black men and Black women. She is being encouraged--in the name of revolution no less--to cultivate "virtues" that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In many ways, Twain and Waugh were strikingly similar. Even within the group of great humorists, they belong together. Both anti-e...rotic imaginations, they stress male comradeships and represent love-relationships most conventionally and sentimentally. They both show society as dominated by fools and bores, and fate as characterized by betrayal and disaster--life as subordinate to death. For that reason, no doubt, both are much interested in militarism and the machinery of death, as well as in the military and manly virtues. Both men tell jokes that belong to the bar where magistrates gather, managers, captains, men who take responsibility for law and order. Both were quickly irritated by most real clubs and bars. One might say that both belonged to the same cultural type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them serio...usly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after the... forms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compare the history of the novel to that of rock 'n' roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splint...ered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women who assume authority are unnatural. Unnatural women are lesbians. Therefore all the leaders of the women's movement were pre...sumed to be lesbians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have no connections here; only gusty collisions, rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.... ... I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn, a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement. People want to push the buttons and see me glow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »