Great Throughts Treasury

"It was like taking a beloved person to the airport and returning to an empty house. I miss the people. I miss the world."

"It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making."

"Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."

"Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism."

"It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived."

"Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."

"Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another."

"Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed."

"Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom."

"Like the effects of industrial pollution ... the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide."

"Lying is the most simple form of self-defense."

"Lying is an elementary means of self-defense."

"Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."

"Modernist tasks and liberties have stirred up a canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment when pressed to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naive, to have much to say about the pictures or to attach to them any explicit "program." No more theories expounding an ideal way of painting. And, as statements wither and with them counter-statements, hardly anything in the way of provocation either. Decorum suggests that artists sound somewhat trapped when being drawn out, and venturing a few cagey glimpses of intention."

"Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it."

"Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics."

"Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals."

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."

"My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything."

"Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic."

"No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most "wars" are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this?"

"Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust."

"Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing."

"One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking."

"One of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there"

"One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits."

"Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties."

"Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr."

"Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal."

"People do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show."

"Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy."

"Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation."

"Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire."

"Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of under-selected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again."

"Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals."

"Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown."

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."

"Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech."

"Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work."

"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable."

"Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

"Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that "it seemed like a movie." This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs."

"Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds."

"Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the "ticking time bomb" situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure."

"Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death."

"Sanity is a cozy lie."

"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "victims.""

"Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois."

"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."

"Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal."