Society

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime. Maybe that's enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If only i could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix; angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dyn.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

As i would not be a slave, so i would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.