The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its... fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'll sing you a new ballad, and I'll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate;... When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate On ev'ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev'ry noble gate, In the fine old English Tory times;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women endure all sorts of devitalizing conditions better than men: starvation, exposure, fatigue, shock, illness, and the like. Th...is immediately raises the question of the supposed "weakness" of the female. Is not the female supposed to be "the weaker vessel"? "Weakness" is a misleading word that has, in this connection, confused most people. "Feminine weakness" has generally meant that the female is more fragile and in general less strong than the male. But the fact is that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male and muscularly less powerful; she has greater stamina and lives longer. The male pays heavily for his larger body build and muscular power. Because his expenditure of energy is greater than that of the female, he burns himself out more rapidly and hence dies at an earlier age. The metabolic rate of the male ... is some 6 to 7 per cent higher than that of the female.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hate him for he is a Christian; But more, for that in low simplicity... He lends out money gratis, and brings down The rate of usance here with us in Venice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To coöperate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two yo...ung men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or coöperate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appeared ...among Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The correct rate of speed in innovating changes in long-standing social customs has not yet been determined by even the most exper...t of the experts. Personally I am beginning to think there is more danger in lagging than in speeding up cultural change to keep pace with mechanical change.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashe...d, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These two men, seemingly so different in their public attitudes--Faulkner hugged his private life, Hemingway made his into a natio...nal epic--responded similarly to inner needs. Self-destructive drinking was a phenomenon common to many American writers besides Hemingway and Faulkner; their commonality went far deeper. Both needed confusion, near disaster, and a reaching for depths before they became pumped up for work. Hemingway by the 1930s had put most of his best work behind him. He developed and peaked well before Faulkner, and the body of his achievement is far smaller as a result, although his influence was larger. Hemingway's turbulence was exhibited on a public scale. By comparison, Faulkner's turmoil was almost invis ible, except to family members and friends near him. He demanded his privacy with the obsession of a man who feared to give away anything which was not in his books. But because his resources were kept so close to his chest, so dammed up inside, he was more suitable for the long haul. He could incubate ideas, techniques, and energies without dissipating them in a great public display. And he could move at his own rate of development.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »