All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismis...s names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity--their links with their dead and the unborn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It ...dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a... set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a hard feeling when everyone's in a hurry to talk to somebody else, but not to talk to you. Sometimes you get a feeling of ne...ed to talk to somebody. Somebody who wants to listen to you other than "Why didn't you get me the right number?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I show my grandchildren, I have a wonderful feeling of pride. I say, "See that crane way, way up there? Grandma used to run a... crane like that during the war."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »