All cultural products contain a mixture of two elements: conventions and inventions. Conventions are elements which are known to b...oth the creator and his audience beforehand--they consist of things like favorite plots, stereotyped characters, accepted ideas, commonly known metaphors and other linguistic devices, etc. Inventions, on the other hand, are elements which are uniquely imagined by the creator, such as new kinds of characters, ideas, or linguistic forms.... Convention and invention have quite different cultural functions. Conventions represent familiar shared images and meanings and they assert an ongoing continuity of values; inventions confront us with a new perception of meaning which we have not realized before. Both these functions are important to culture. Conventions help maintain a culture's stability while inventions help it respond to changing circumstances and provide new information about the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Magic is the envelopment and coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a dynamic subjectivism. Religion is the coercion of... the ego by gods and spirits who are objectively conceived beings in control of nature and man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have what I would call educational genocide. I'm concerned about learning totally, but I'm immersed in the disastrous record of... how many black kids are going into science. They are very few and far between. I've said that when I see more black students in the laboratories than I see on the football field, I'll be happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to u...s that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic ...identities of men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A... man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man's worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these defin...itions remain intact--that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity--men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My only objection to the arrangements there is the two-in-a-bed system. It is bad.... But let your words and conduct be perfectly ...pure--such as your mother might know without bringing a blush to your cheek.... If not already mentioned, do not tell your mother of the doubling in bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »