Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of tria...l and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident--the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a ...flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and t...he geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows ... the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The woman movement is one which is uniting by co-operating influences, all the antagonisms that are warring on the family state. S...piritualism, free love, free divorce, the vicious indulgences consequent on unregulated civilization, the worldliness which tempts men and women to avoid large families, often by sinful methods, thus making the ignorant masses the chief supply of the future ruling majorities; and most powerful of all, the feeble constitution and poor health of women, causing them to dread maternity as--what it is fast becoming--an accumulation of mental and bodily tortures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world... is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not onl...y by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years' life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. ...Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Under an accumulation of staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent. No man knocks himself down; if his destiny knocks him... down, his destiny must pick him up again."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over... the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »