16 quotes
In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened.
It All Adds Up (1994)
This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.
It All Adds Up (1994)
There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives.
It All Adds Up (1994)
The principles of Western liberalism seem no longer to lend themselves to effective action. Deprived of the expressive power, we are awed by it, have a hunger for it, and are afraid of it.
It All Adds Up (1994)
Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
It All Adds Up (1994)
Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political thinkers, to name only a few of the categories affected, must woo their readers, viewers, listeners, from distraction.
It All Adds Up (1994)
There is no need to make an inventory of the times. It is demoralizing to describe ourselves to ourselves yet again.
It All Adds Up (1994)
We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.
It All Adds Up (1994)
The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.
It All Adds Up (1994)
So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity.
It All Adds Up (1994)
When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.
It All Adds Up (1994)
In politics continental Europe was infantile — horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.
It All Adds Up (1994)
Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.
It All Adds Up (1994)
It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.
It All Adds Up (1994)
It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.
It All Adds Up (1994)
Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?
It All Adds Up (1994)