In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Cath...olic countries, a successful person is a sinner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion ...of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fear prophets ... and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, a...t times instead of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth li...es in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of thin...gs. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers ...want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruc...tion leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly" because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever ...being completely consumed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »