Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all--no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it ...sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself--a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ask you to join in a re-United States. We need to empower our people so they can take more responsibility for their own lives in... a world that is ever smaller, where everyone counts.... We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together, or the American Dream will continue to wither. Our destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensation...s which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In England the judges should have independence to protect the people against the crown. Here the judges should not be independent ...of the people, but be appointed for not more than seven years. The people would always re-elect the good judges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Re-born, he was in the other life, the greater day of the human consciousness. And he was lone and apart from the little day, and ...out of contact with the daily people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I retract nothing heretofore said as to slavery. I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that "while I remain in my present posi...tion I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress." If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Despite the great differences in the objectives of the two men, there are important similarities between them. The most obvious on...es are in the area of personality. Both presidents had a quick smile and a pleasant air about them. People liked Roosevelt, as they did Reagan, almost without regard for his policies.... Both men led charmed political lives, in which they were praised for everything people liked, while the blame for all problems fell on others. FDR was a "Teflon president" long before Teflon was invented. After Roosevelt had won re-election to a second term, he had the temerity to point out that "one-third of the nation" was "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." And in his re-election campaign in 1984, Reagan continued to run against the "gov-mint," as he disdainfully pronounced it, even after having been in charge of it for nearly four years. And Franklin Roosevelt was the first "media president," clearly deserving the title "Great Communicator." He charmed radio listeners much as Reagan did his television audiences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unthinking people speak of the motion picture as the medium of "action"; the truth is that the stage is the medium of action while... the screen is the medium of reaction. It is through identification with the person acted upon on the screen, and not with the person acting, that the film builds up its oscillating power with the audience. This is understood instinctively by expert film-makers, but to my knowledge it has never been formulated. At any emotional crisis in a film, when a character is saying something which profoundly affects another, it is to this second character that the camera instinctively roves, perhaps in close-up; and it is then that the hearts of the audience quiver and open in release, or rock with laughter or shrink with pain, leap to the screen and back again in swift-growing vibrations. The great actors of the stage are actors; of the screen, re-actors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physica...lly absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you ...can fool all of the people all of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »