“Such cultural homosexuality is an alienation more or less forced upon certain groups of Auden’s society by the form of their education and the nature of their social and financial conditions. Where the members of a class and a sex are taught, in a prolonged narcissistic isolation, to hero-worship themselves—class and sex; where—to a different class—unemployment is normal, where one’s pay is inadequate or impossible for more than one; where children are expensive liabilities instead of assets; where women are business competitors; where most social relationships have become as abstract, individualistic, and mobile as the relations of the labor market, homosexuality is a welcome asset to the state, one of the cheapest and least dangerous forms of revolution.”
“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, pp. 127–128
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
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Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965Related quotes
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1880s, Speech on the Anniversary of Emancipation (1886)
Context: I admit the charge, but deny that nature, race, or color has anything to do with the fact. Any other race, with the same antecedents and the same conditions, would show a similar thieving propensity. The American people have this lesson to learn, that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property would be safe... While I hold now, as I held years ago, that the South is the natural home of the colored race, and that there must the destiny of that race be mainly worked out, I still believe that means can be and ought to be adopted, to assist in the emigration of such of their number as may wish to change their residence to parts of the country, where their civil and political rights are better protected than at present they can be at the South... The Republican party is not perfect; it is cautious even to the point of timidity; but it is the best friend we have.

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 26

“Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”
Decline and Fall (1928)

“When a society spends more on advertising than it does on education, where is it headed?”
Source: The New Party - (1961), Chapter 8, The Forecast Is Good, p. 102
Context: What shall it profit us, unless life in the midst of it all has meaning? When a society spends more on advertising than it does on education, where is it headed?

“The Meaning of a Liberal Education”, Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association (9 January 1909)
1900s

“Theaters are the opposite of class lectures, the front row is where the action is.”
Source: Five Point Someone - What not to do at IIT! (2004), P. 87

Speech in Liverpool (28 June 1886), quoted in The Times (29 June 1886), p. 11.
1880s