A few days ago, while seated snugly in an airplane seat on my way back to New York from Chicago,... it occurred to me that a rathe...r striking similarity existed between the situation I found myself in then, flying in a modern airplane, and what I've often felt as I watch television. To begin with, both experiences are largely passive, or at any rate they have been transformed into passive experiences. But this shared passivity is itself more complicated than it seems, for though it produces in both cases an obvious condition of quiet and inactivity, it also demands from the passenger or viewer a very definite emotional commitment. One might call it a commitment to specifically nonaggressive and uninvolved behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is to be done with people who can't read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?... Show me a Sunday paper which has been l...eft in a condition fit only for kite flying, and I will show you an antisocial and dangerous character who has left it that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into on...e of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Spig Wead: I've been thinking what a heel I've been about you and about my own kids. I don't know, when I do something, I go all t...he way. Living. Gambling. Flying. I tap myself out. I guess that's the way I want it to be. Maybe even the way I am. Minne Wead: Star-spangled Spig. Damn the martinis, full speed ahead and don't give up the ship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good way to think about television--in fact all the media--is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looki...ng. Then from its perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on the average) 30 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 30 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the wa...y toward flying up into the air, dancing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While my companions were seeking a suitable spot ... I improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain alone....... I began to work my way, scarcely less arduous than Satan's anciently through Chaos, up the nearest though not the highest peak, at first scrambling on all fours over the tops of ancient black spruce trees (Abies nigra), old as the flood, from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their tops flat and spreading, and their foliage blue, and nipped with cold, as if for centuries they had ceased growing upward against the bleak sky, the solid cold.... This was the sort of garden I made my way over, for an eighth of a mile, at the risk, it is true, of treading on some of the plants, not seeing any path through it,--certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled. "Nigh foundered on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the... other fellow to make the first move--and he, in turn, waits for you. The minute a person whose word means a great deal dares to take the open- hearted and courageous way, many others follow. Not everyone can be turned aside from meanness and hatred, but the great majority of Americans is heading in that direction. I have a great belief in the future of my people and my country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a... city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »