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 »
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 »
What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the devel...opment of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some animals, especially domesticated animals, are extremely susceptible to signs. A dog will react to the slightest change in the... behavior of his master; he will even distinguish the expressions of a human face or the modulations of a human voice. But it is far cry from these phenomena to an understanding of symbolic and human speech.... Symbols--in the proper sense of this term--cannot be reduced to mere signals. Signals and symbols belong to two different universes of discourse: a signal is a part of the physical world of being; a symbol is a part of the human world of meaning. Signals are "operators"; symbols are "designators."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literatur...e, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us w...hat to do, it always cautions us what not to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aging process is a part of most of our lives, and it remains one we try to ignore until it seems to pounce upon us. We evade a...ll its signals. We stay blandly unprepared for some of its obnoxious effects, even though we have coped with the cracked voices and puzzling glands of our emerging natures, and have been guided no matter how clumsily through budding love-pains, morning sickness, and hot flashes. We do what our mentors teach us to do, but few of us acknowledge that the last years of our lives, if we can survive to live them out, are as physically predictable as infancy's or those of our full flowering. This seems impossible, but it is true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The experience of a sense of guilt for wrong-doing is necessary for the development of self-control. The guilt feelings will later... serve as a warning signal which the child can produce himself when an impulse to repeat the naughty act comes over him. When the child can produce his on warning signals, independent of the actual presence of the adult, he is on the way to developing a conscience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cann...ot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The term preschooler signals another change in our expectations of children. While toddler refers to physical development, prescho...oler refers to a social and intellectual activity: going to school. That shift in emphasis is tremendously important, for it is at this age that we think of children as social creatures who can begin to solve problems.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »