Socialite women meet socialite men and mate and breed socialite children so that we can fund small opera companies and ballet trou...pes because there is no government subsidy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The social kiss is an exchange of insincerity between two combatants on the field of social advancement. It places hygiene before ...affection and condescension before all else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex ...and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot functi...on without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Development, it turns out, occurs through this process of progressively more complex exchange between a child and somebody else--e...specially somebody who's crazy about that child.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of s...cience has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, dis...tances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its... fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To regard one's immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive vi...olin it held has broken and lost its worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »