1960s, Civil Rights Bill signing speech (1964)
1960s, Civil Rights Bill signing speech (1964)
Source: Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
Alle zweckmäßigen Lebenserscheinungen wie ihre Zweckmäßigkeit überhaupt sind letzten Endes zweckmäßig nicht für das Leben, sondern für den Ausdruck seines Wesens, für die Darstellung seiner Bedeutung.
The Task of the Translator (1920)
Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 168
The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, 1984
“A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.”
2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)
Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)
Context: Man, by means of his physical power, his mechanical resources, his mental ingenuity, may set things side by side. A composition, literally so called, will result, but not a great art work, not at all an art work in fact, but merely a more or less refined exhibition of brute force exercised upon helpful materials. It may be as a noise in lessening degrees of offensiveness, it can never become a musical tone. Though it shall have ceased to be vulgar in becoming sophistical, it will remain to the end what it was in the beginning: impotent to inspire — dead, absolutely dead.
It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to its life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit. It must stand for the actual, vital first-hand experiences of the one who made it, and must represent his deep-down impression not only of physical nature but more especially and necessarily his understanding of the out-working of that Great Spirit which makes nature so intelligible to us that it ceases to be a phantasm and becomes a sweet, a superb, a convincing Reality.
Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 145-146
