Stories of law violations are weighed on a different set of scales in the Black mind than in the white. Petty crimes embarrass the... community and many people wistfully wonder why Negroes don't rob more banks, embezzle more funds and employ graft in the unions.... This ... appeals particularly to one who is unable to compete legally with his fellow citizens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a ...University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo- a...nd heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all--no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it ...sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself--a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Gospel of the army is cunning, as of all other human activities. The wisdom of the snake under the meekness of the sheep is wh...at wins out. The first Commandment is--never let them get anything on you-- The second: Graft--get privileges others haven't got--worm yourself into confidence The Third--seem neat and prosperous--as if you had money in the bank--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal, ...has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The clause which lived twenty-four hours in the Alabama Constitution, granting to taxpaying women owning $500 worth of property th...e suffrage on questions of bonded indebtedness, was killed by a disease peculiar to the genus homo known as chivalry. In the case in point, the diagnosis revealed that the fairest, purest and brightest jewels that ever shone under the brilliant rays of God's shining sun would be immeasurably lowered by voting upon questions relating to the taxation of their own property. Yet, under the vagaries of this disease, this same convention conferred on husbands the right to vote on their wives' property. This is the same character of chivalry which gives the wages of the brightest, fairest jewels to the husband, which makes impossible equal pay for equal work and which classes the jewels with the idiots, insane and criminals in that and other States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Regna regnis lupi, The State is a wolf unto the State. It is not a pessimistic lamentation like the old homo homini lupus [Man is ...a wolf to Man], but a positive creed and political ideal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »