“Fashion is custom in the guise of departure from custom.”
Edward Sapir (1884–1939) American linguist and anthropologist
Source: Fashion (1931), p. 140
Source: What Entropy Means to Me (1972), Chapter 10 “The Final Struggle” (p. 160).
“Fashion is custom in the guise of departure from custom.”
Edward Sapir (1884–1939) American linguist and anthropologist
Source: Fashion (1931), p. 140
Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art
Referring to the curiosity and sense of wonder of the child, p. 17
Collected Poems (1966)
“If you do not give the people reform they are going to give you social revolution.”
Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (1907–2001) British judge, politician, life peer and Cabinet minister
As quoted in Social democracy - The enemy within by Harpal Brar, pg. 162.
George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family
Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 120
“The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.
I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context.
“This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution.”
Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist
"Address to the Women of America" (10 July 1971)
Context: This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen, or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…
Source: The State — Its Historic Role (1897), I
Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary
Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch. 8
“Retired to their tea and scandal, according to their ancient custom.”
William Congreve The Double Dealer
Act I, scene i
The Double Dealer (1694)
“The Roman state survives by its ancient customs and its manhood.”
Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque.
Ennius (-239–-169 BC) Roman writer
Annals, Book V