At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater an...d lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens--women, workers and the members of subject races--to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to rea...d further in it; he was under none to begin.... A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Faced with even a temporary delay or absence, children pound and scream and bawl; but as soon as the situation changes, they are b...afflingly sunny, and take their gratification with relish, or feel secure again when mother returns. It is said that "children cannot wait," but just the contrary is true. It is children who can wait, by making dramatic scenes (not otherwise than religious people get through hours of stress by singing hymns). They have a spontaneous mechanism to cushion even minor troubles. Rather it is the adults who have inhibited their spontaneous expression, who cannot wait; we swallow our disappointment and always taste what we have swallowed. For where the occasions of passion occur, where there is actual frustration and misery, and yet anger and grief are not explosively released, then the disposition itself is soured, and such happiness as follows is never full and unclouded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover... diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited. I believe in people so much that if the whole of civiliz...ation is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity--a function. We don't need history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, bu...t neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a flourishing tropic he required For his refreshment, an abundant zone,... Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious, Yet with a harmony not rarefied Nor fined for the inhibited instruments Of over-civil stops.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it ...is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face--as if hung on a scaffol...d of heavy private brooding; & thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who feel insecure in social situations never miss a chance to exhibit their dominance over close, submissive friends, whom ...they put down publicly, in front of everyone--by teasing, for example.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »