Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban m...asses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... 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 »
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 »
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 »
A universal and perpetual peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events which will never exist but in the imaginations ...of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home--so close and so small that they cannot be seen ...on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Shakespeare has a singularity, it is because he has become a black hole. Light, insight, intelligence, matter--all pour ceasele...ssly into him, as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass. The light from other stars--other poets, other dramatists--is wrenched and bent as it passes by him on its way to us. He warps cultural space-time; he distorts our view of the universe around him. As Emerson said, "Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see." But Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light; his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of his own reputation. We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If modernism had tried to anchor in consciousness a centre which could no longer hold--the conscience of the heroic, socially alie...nated artist--postmodernism had shown us an even darker side of modernity and the aporias of the aesthetic. It had shown that there is nothing for consciousness to be anchored to: no universal ground of truth, justice, or reason, so that consciousness itself is thus "decentred," no longer origin, author, location of intentional agency but a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect--Dover Beach displaced by an international airport lounge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here lies the body of William Jones Who all his life collected bones,... Till Death, that grim and boney spectre, That universal bone collector, Boned old Jones, so neat and tidy, And here he lies, all bona fide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »