Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the con...sequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the m...ilitia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men--serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and are commonly treated as enemies by it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments becom...e prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The old guard may grumble and occasionally sue, but in a society where Portnoy's Complaint is a record-breaking best- seller sexua...l permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve-ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call it...self fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance--that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »