... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off th...e conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us--extraordinary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the... middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by rea...l deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the... feminine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break and the female woman finally... to emerge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember wh...at femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way.... She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method doe...s expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh Doris Lessing, my dear--your Anna is wrong about orgasms. They are no proof of love--any more than that other Anna's fall under... the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It's all female shenanigans, cultural mishegoss, conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing. What does a woman want? She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms--like every family has color TV--and we can all get on with the real business of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But what is a symbol? A symbol does not direct our attention to something else as a sign does. It does not direct at all. It "mean...s" something else. It somehow comes to contain within itself the thing it means. The word "ball" is a sign to my dog and a symbol to me. If I say "ball" to my dog, he will respond like a good Pavlovian organism and look under the sofa and fetch it. But if I say "ball" to you, you will simply look at me and, if you are patient, finally say, "What about it?" The dog responds to the word by looking for thing; you conceive the ball through the word "ball."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before... air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents--or at least their staffs--never stop making mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »