Could it not be that just at the moment masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, wome...n are beginning to rise in response to the Mother's call to save her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution? Can our revolution mean anything else than the reversion of social and economic control to Her representatives among Womankind, and the resumption of Her worship on the face of the Earth? Do we dare demand less?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear load...ed with innuendo and fraught with implications.... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents are never forgiven for not giving just the right response at the appropriate moment. Or, rather, there are particular time...s in the adolescent's or young adult's life, when a certain response is needed, and this need is not met, and the failure to meet this need is forever remembered, and is never forgiven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior--bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper-...-it's possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother's impending visit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising..., the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of tria...l and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident--the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who change...s spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, o...r just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the schem...e of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »