The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Manners... and Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfull...y accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has wished, drawing the sum of one's life--all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had been living in Berlin since 1922, thus synchronously with the young man of the book; but neither this fact, nor my sharing s...ome of his interests, such as literature and lepidoptera, should make one say "aha" and identify the designer with the design.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the r...ights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no,... for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, on...ly seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks ...on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France, and of Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of him;" "assez de Bonaparte."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You see, male man was made with five strong senses to gather the truth of things and his mind is a threshing floor to clean his tr...uth in. This is often an unhappy thing, for man sees himself as he really is. Thus he is made very miserable. But he does not destroy himself because the female man was made with squint eyes so that she sees only those things which please her. And her threshing floor is cramped and cluttered. She cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. But she achieves a harvest that makes her happy. When she sees man fleeing from her own dish and he is blindly and divinely happy. Ah, yes, the female companion of man has the gift of the soothing-balm of lies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,-...-because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »