American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects -- making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
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Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects --making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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A fiction about soft or easy deaths ... is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been -- what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal -- needs to be protected from people.
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Perversity is the muse of modern literature
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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.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
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What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
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Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.
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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...
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... liberal intellectuals ... tend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping that those in po...
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences suicide. Or murder.
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A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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