The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across ...the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century--sex and paranoia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin--a la...nguage with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established, grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double sign...ificance.... In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That work is ever more pleasant to the imagination which is not now required. How wistfully, when we have promised to attend the w...orking committee, we look at the distant hills and their seductions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest de...partment store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. He would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that his neighbors were just a little less privileged than he.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Mankind is getting smarter every day." Actually, it only seems so. "At least we are making progress." We're progressing, to be su...re, ever more deeply into the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly s...tructured and to struggle against entropy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a... constant submission to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »