... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off th...e conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us--extraordinary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the... middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by rea...l deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meani...ngs in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If psychoanalysis emerged just before World War I to deal with the repressions of Puritanism, the hedonistic age has its counterpa...rt in sensitivity training, encounter groups, "joy therapy," and similar techniques that have two characteristics essentially derived from a hedonistic mood: they are conducted almost exclusively in groups; and they try to "unblock" the individual by physical contact, by groping, touching, fondling, manipulating. Where the earlier intention of psychoanalysis was to enable the patient to achieve self-insight and thereby redirect his life--an aim inseparable from a moral context--the newer therapies are entirely instrumental and psychologistic; their aim is to "free" the person from inhibitions and restraints so that he or she can more easily express his impulses and feelings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America owes most of its social prejudices to the exaggerated religious opinions of the different sects which were so instrumental... in establishing the colonies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the... feminine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break and the female woman finally... to emerge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember wh...at femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way.... She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to ministe...r to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »