Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.
“The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.”
A Fire on the Moon (1970), Pt. 1, Ch. 1
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Norman Mailer 165
American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film m… 1923–2007Related quotes
“The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.”
Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995)
1990s
Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within, Broadway Books, NY, 1997.
R. G. Collingwood (1937), as cited in: Patrick Suppes (1973), Logic, methodology and philosophy of science: Proceedings.
Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism
D 62
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)
“The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.”
Wars I Have Seen (1945)
Four Speeches on the Corporate State, Rome, (1935) pp. 39-40. Speech delivered to the workers in Milan. Eric Jabbari, Pierre Laroque and the Welfare State in Postwar France, Oxford University Press, (2012) p. 46
Context: Fascism establishes the real equality of individuals before the nation… the object of the regime in the economic field is to ensure higher social justice for the whole of the Italian people… What does social justice mean? It means work guaranteed, fair wages, decent homes, it means the possibility of continuous evolution and improvement. Nor is this enough. It means that the workers must enter more and more intimately into the productive process and share its necessary discipline… As the past century was the century of capitalist power, the twentieth century is the century of power and glory of labour.
“The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.”
Werner Erhard on L. Ron Hubbard — quoted in [L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, 1987, Bent Corydon and Ronald DeWolf, 15, 0818404442]
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