In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But in do...ing so they contribute to making their fatherland, abandoned by spirit, into the gaping jaws of Asia that would like to swallow our little Europe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our tim...e.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Japan gets the most of ordinary people by organizing them to adapt and succeed. America, by getting out of their way so that they ...can adjust individually, allows them to succeed. It is not that Japan has no individualists and America no organizations, but the thrusts of the societies are different. Japan has distorted its economy and depressed its living standard in order to keep its job structure and social values as steady as possible. At the government's direction, the entire economy has tried to flex almost as one, in response to the ever-changing world. The country often seems like a family that becomes more tightly bound together when it must withstand war, emigration, or some other upheaval. America's strength is the opposite: it opens its doors and brings the world's disorder in. It tolerates social change that would tear most other countries apart. The openness encourages Americans to adapt as individuals rather than as a group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalen...t, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, ep...idemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma.... (We had to witness) wars ... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities ... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations).... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of ... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases ... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »