
"Into the Mainstream" in Intelligence Report (Summer 2003) at the Southern Poverty Law Center http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=105
Chap.I: The Coming Of The Masses
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
Context: The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone.
"Into the Mainstream" in Intelligence Report (Summer 2003) at the Southern Poverty Law Center http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=105
25 February 1852 (p. 152)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)
"Roman Polanski: An Exclusive Interview" by Taylor Montague
Context: You know, whenever you do something new and original, people run to see it because it's different. Then, if it happens to be successful, the studios rush to imitate it. It becomes commonplace right away. But it's been like that before, I think. Now, the stakes are so gigantic that they cut each other's throats. So if most of the films are failures, then those that succeed so spectacularly, so commercially, become the norm. It's like a roulette for the studios. The problem with it is that it becomes more and more of a committee. Before, you dealt with the studio. It had one or two persons and now you have masses of executives who have to justify their existence and write so-called "creative notes" and have creative meetings. They obsess about the word creative probably because they aren't.
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 241
Source: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter VIII: Personality
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)