Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection... and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resem...ble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The automobile and the telephone are defeated as instruments of individualism by being applied to the needs of a mass society. The... automobile fulfills man's desire to move over the surface of the earth all by himself; but by becoming accessible to everybody, automobiles have paralyzed our streets. Individualism is possible only in plenty of empty space. Similarly, telephones block their own paths of individual communication when everybody is talking: the phone is too often "busy." Private enterprise cannot but strangle itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see ...but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art p...urifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What's important is promising something to the people, not actually keeping those promises.... The people have always lived on hop...e alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface and perc...eives it so exclusively that the devil of hatred, despite all his terror-inspiring cruelty, never is entirely free of ridicule and of a somewhat dilettantish aspect. One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head. Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul an...d become richer in their humaneness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »