My idea is that the world outside--the so-called modern world--can only pervert and degrade the conceptions of the primitive insti...nct of art and feeling, and that our only chance is to accept the limited number of survivors--the one- in-a-thousand of born artists and poets--and to intensify the energy of feeling within that radiant centre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church.... We have a free choice, but at a price. ...We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'd never set foot in San Francisco. Of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs in our modern world, it is the worst. There are not 10 righte...ous (and courageous) men there. It needs another quake, another whiff of fire--and--more than all else--a steady trade wind of grapeshot.... That moral penal colony of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The presence of the blacks is the greatest evil that threatens the United States. They increase, in the Gulf States, faster than d...o the whites. They cannot be kept for ever in slavery, since the tendencies of the modern world run strongly the other way. They cannot be absorbed into the white population, for the whites will not intermarry with them, not even in the North where they have been free for two generations. Once freed, they would be more dangerous than now, because they would not long submit to be debarred from political rights. A terrible struggle would ensue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People... ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the mediaeval, with dimmer ...vision, worshipped as asceticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »