America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. ...The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... only a controlled fertility in human beings can maintain any progress. No system of society depending for its continuation on ...intelligent humans can stand long unless it encourages the control of the birth rate and includes contraceptive knowledge as a right. Without it no system, no matter what its ideals, can withstand the overpowering force of uncontrolled, unrestricted fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't believe there is one woman within the confines of this state who does not believe in birth control. I never met one. That ...is, I never met one who thought that she should be kept in ignorance of contraceptive methods. Many I have met who valued the knowledge they possessed, but thought there were certain other classes who would be better kept in ignorance. The old would protect the young. The rich would keep the poor in ignorance. The good would keep their knowledge from the bad, the strong from the weak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't really know how most of my ventures in this work were ever financed. I am of no economical turn of mind. I do things first..., and somehow or another they get paid for. If I had waited to finance my various battles for birth control, I do not suppose they ever would have become realities. I suppose here is the real difference between the idealist--or the "fanatic, as we are called--and the ordinary "normal" human being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control.... Compa...red to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and "charitable" acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of the brain consists of "wires"; a single unit may have thousands of connections with other units and with itself. That is n...ot the case in a standard computer, where a chip usually has less than six connections. Moreover, neurons are much, much slower than the switching elements of the computer. It seems likely that the brain can accomplish its complex feats of perception and thought by means of millions of connections acting in parallel. The connections as a whole define the information content of the system. In this way a vast amount of knowledge can be brought to bear on a decision all at once. The brain seems to be able to perform as many as two hundred trillion operations in a second; not serially, but simultaneously.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control--"indoctrinatio...n" we might say--exercised through the mass media.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many more children observe attitudes, values and ways different from or in conflict with those of their families, social networks,... and institutions. Yet today's young people are no more mature or capable of handling the increased conflicting and often stimulating information they receive than were young people of the past, who received the information and had more adult control of and advice about the information they did receive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of Stat...es. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to deve...lop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »