The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be... accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention--on a landsca...pe, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God--that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.... The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it suppl...ies a sanction.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 »
The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual lib...eration, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a co...ncentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.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 »