Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker... into the game?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 »
[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The ho...rse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We now come to the grand law of the system in which we are placed, as it has been developed by the experience of our race, and tha...t, in one word, is SACRIFICE!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are now going through a period of demolition. In morals, in social life, in politics, in medicine, and in religion there is a u...niversal upturning of foundations. But the day of reconstruction seems to be looming, and now the grand question is: Are there any sure and universal principles that will evolve a harmonious system in which we shall all agree?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great deal of unnecessary worry is indulged in by theatregoers trying to understand what Bernard Shaw means. They are not satisf...ied to listen to a pleasantly written scene in which three or four clever people say clever things, but they need to purse their lips and scowl a little and debate as to whether Shaw meant the lines to be an attack on monogamy as an institution or a plea for manual training in the public school system.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injus...tice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control.... Compa...red to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and "charitable" acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns wh...ich he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »