Source: Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 15.
Context: What gift can I give you from this cell out of which my hand cannot pass? I give you the hand of the people. What celebration can I hold for you? I give you the celebration of a celebrated memory and a celebrated name. You are the heir to and inheritor of the most ancient civilization. Please make your full contribution to making this ancient civilization the most progressive and the most powerful. By progressive and powerful I do not mean the most dreaded. A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science, with modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search. In other words, a classless society has to emerge but not necessarily a Marxist society. The Marxist society has created its own class structure.
“I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.”
Interview with Ed Hirsch (1986), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (Penguin, 1988)
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Derek Walcott 17
Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright 1930–2017Related quotes
Role of a Woman http://english.bayynat.org.lb/WomenFamily/woman1.htm
“Culture can flourish only under the protection of a society with aristocratic characteristics.”
Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 12.
Under section header: The Enterprise as Society's Mirror
1930s- 1950s, The New Society (1950)
2014, Address to the United Nations (September 2014)
“We are to a large extent an imitative society.”
RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)
On the Unspeakable, Avant-Pop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-Pop:_Fiction_for_a_Daydream_Nation, p. 150
1989 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LYL1PTrtXo with James Dobson