Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longin...gs for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigge...r and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera--and himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself beco...mes not a power but an image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is... created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded ho...pe, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has b...een abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great practical difference between the word, written or spoken, and the visual image is that we cannot read the former unless ...we have been initiated into the mystery of language, whereas visual images can be made intelligible to all men who have eyes.... The spiritual difference between the written word and the visual image is equally great. Precise though a word is, evocative though it be, the actual machinery of visual perception is not engaged. All that takes place, takes place now within the mind; the retina and the neurons sleep; we are in a world which has been created by old, long-stored stimuli; the accidents of energy exterior to ourselves have been totally excluded from it. Even the spoken word is further from this spiritual purity than the word upon the page, for sounds have at least a sensual immediacy of a sort, but the written word is only the ghost of a sound. We have entered now into a realm not of images but of substitutes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not... follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »