
Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 8, Holy Dread, p. 197-198
"Introduction" to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí
Context: The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.
Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 8, Holy Dread, p. 197-198
"Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)
Interview in The New York Times (28 November 1993).
Context: I believe that in the 20th century, humanity has learned from many, many experiences. Some positive, and many negative. What misery, what destruction! The greatest number of human beings were killed in the two world wars of this century. But human nature is such that when we face a tremendous critical situation, the human mind can wake up and find some other alternative. That is a human capacity.
Awake! magazine 1999, 12/8, article: The Most Profound Changes.
Source: The Corporate Revolution in America, 1957, p. 287
Letter to Miss Barnes http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/carlyle/jwclam/lam301.html#LM3-207 (24 August 1859).
“Again and again our foe, religion, has given birth to deeds sinful and unholy.”
Saepius illa
religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta.
Book I, lines 82–83 (tr. C. Bailey)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)