There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics;... I speak of the infinite.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cannons and fire-arms are cruel and damnable machines; I believe them to have been the direct suggestion of the Devil. If Adam had... seen in a vision the horrible instruments his children were to invent, he would have died of grief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of in...come.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true P...oet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... it is only after years and years that you can speak of penury in the midst of opulence, of hunger in the midst of almost sinfu...l plenty. You must never speak of the immediate experience unless and until you have learned its consequent value. Otherwise you grow old in bitterness which is barren and futile....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and ...no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. But religion is essentially cosmological, though its cosmology is always an imaginative cosmology. Any given religious experience can be fitted by this cosmology into the scheme of the whole, and labeled as an ascent into the third heaven, a temptation of the devil, and so forth. Hence religion is social, as art can never be. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. But the sociability of religion is part of its fundamental nature. The life of religion is always the life of a church.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Faultless honesty is a sine qua non of business life. Not alone the honesty according to the moral code and the Bible. When I spea...k of honesty I refer to the small, hidden, evasive meannesses of our natures. I speak of the honesty of ourselves to ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unthinking people speak of the motion picture as the medium of "action"; the truth is that the stage is the medium of action while... the screen is the medium of reaction. It is through identification with the person acted upon on the screen, and not with the person acting, that the film builds up its oscillating power with the audience. This is understood instinctively by expert film-makers, but to my knowledge it has never been formulated. At any emotional crisis in a film, when a character is saying something which profoundly affects another, it is to this second character that the camera instinctively roves, perhaps in close-up; and it is then that the hearts of the audience quiver and open in release, or rock with laughter or shrink with pain, leap to the screen and back again in swift-growing vibrations. The great actors of the stage are actors; of the screen, re-actors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »