Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these defin...itions remain intact--that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity--men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.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 »
It is little wonder that rape is one of the least-reported crimes. Perhaps it is the only crime in which the victim becomes the ac...cused and, in reality, it is she who must prove her good reputation, her mental soundness, and her impeccable propriety.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Journalism over here is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be overrated. Politicians are frightened of the press, an...d in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalising effect upon Spain (of which she is unconscious), headlines of murder, rape, and rubbish, excite and demoralise the American public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in hi...s assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against ou...r souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Terrorism is an intolerant reaction to the hypertolerance of our societies, just as rape may be an intolerance of our boundless se...xual tolerance (paradoxically, the number of rapes increases with the degree of sexual liberation). It is second-generation violence--a reaction to the absence of violence. The same is true of the second-generation illnesses (cancer); they are a reaction to the hyperprotection of our bodies. When a woman turns off all signals of pleasure in your arms and leaves you no other solution but a disenchanted rape, no phantasy is of any use. But the same applies when her sexual demand is so great as to leave no room even for the illusion of rape.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point... of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting--the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »