Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. O...f all weaknesses he most disliked timed and half-hearted faith. He would rather have jumped at once to Strong's pure denial, than yield an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because it could not be explained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The function of the hero in art is to inspire the reader or spectator to continue in the same spirit from where he, the hero, leav...es off. He must release the spectator's potentiality, for potentiality is the historic force behind nobility. And to do this the hero must be typical of the characters and class who at that time only need to be made aware of their heroic potentiality in order to be able to make their society juster and nobler. Bourgeois culture is no longer capable of producing heroes. On the highbrow level it only produces characters who are embodied consolations for defeat, and on the lowbrow level it produces idols--stars, TV "personalities," pin-ups. The function of the idol is the exact opposite to that of the hero. The idol is self-sufficient; the hero never is. The idol is so superficially desirable, spectacular, witty, happy that he or she merely supplies a context for fantasy and therefore, instead of inspiring, lulls. The idol is based on the appearance of perfection; but never on the striving towards it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I almost wished that I was still in prison. I felt I wasn't ready to be out making decisions.... Even now over three years a...fter my release, I can carry around fifty rand for two weeks and not spend it. I go into shops, but I find it hard to choose things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christianity was only a very strong and singularly well-timed Salvation Army movement that happened to receive help from an unusua...l and highly dramatic incident. It was a Puritan reaction in an age when, no doubt, a Puritan reaction was much wanted; but like all sudden violent reactions, it soon wanted reacting against.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I fear I agree with your friend in not liking all sermons. Some of them, one has to confess, are rubbish: but then I release my at...tention from the preacher, and go ahead in any line of thought he may have started: and his after-eloquence acts as a kind of accompaniment--like music while one is reading poetry, which often, to me, adds to the effect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man of sense soon discovers, because he carefully observes, where and how long he is welcome; and takes care to leave the compan...y at least as soon as he is wished out of it. Fools never perceive whether they are ill timed or ill placed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An inquiry about the attitude towards the release of so-called political prisoners. I should be very sorry to see the United State...s holding anyone in confinement on account of any opinion that that person might hold. It is a fundamental tenet of our institutions that people have a right to believe what they want to believe and hold such opinions as they want to hold without having to answer to anyone for their private opinion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered th...e pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud makes much of the distinction between jokes which just barely make sense, and those whose main value lies in the sense they ...make. He calls the first kind "jests," and thinks them radically distinct from wit. In jests our motive is the mere pleasure that children have in talking nonsense, a pleasure that he thinks is not of itself comic. The fact that our nonsense does just barely, in another sense, make sense, serves only to appease our critical judgment and release us from our adult task of inhibiting these childish proclivities. The energy which we had been employing in this task, however, being thus liberated, not only greatly increases our pleasure in the nonsense, but, in some manner which Freud does not even try to explain, makes it a comic pleasure. When, however, besides barely making sense, a piece of nonsense actually "says a mouthful" on some subject of current interest, or taps our deeper reservoirs of sexual and aggressive passion, then the pleasure is still greater--and still more comic, I suppose--and the jest is properly called wit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »