Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
We are, as a culture and as a specias, in the midst of a great awakening, remembering that there is a nature of things, an inherent, Divine design. The more aware of and in alignment with that design we can become, the more we will experience the deep desires of our hearts and souls, and perhaps, together, we can truly create a world that works for everyone.
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.
All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don’t get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture!
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.
The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.
The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won … it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.
Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.
The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.
The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.
The relationships among natural and drug-induced alterations of consciousness must be understood from an evolutionary perspective. This reveals altered consciousness to be related to endogenous mechanism, which are triggered by both ancient evolutionary adaptations and more recently acquired propensities to use exogenous sources of substances to alter consciousness.
إذا أردت أن تدمر ثقافة .. لا تحرق الكتب، فقط اجعل الناس لا يقرأوها
Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.
We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating disorders among boys as we see the reports of sexual abuse for male children increasing. Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders.
It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
