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page 74

“Everywhere these inventions of science by ignorant misuse of a new technique were wiping out the artist.”

“But soon this saving virtue appeared to me in our disgraceful dilemma: Realization that any true cultural significance our American free society could know lay in the proper use of the machine as a tool and used only as a tool.”

“Different were the prophets of the human soul.”

“Success was misunderstood as essential to progress. Really success was worse than failure.”

“If the abstraction is truly made well above the animal nature in man—his gregarious nature—it will keep the ancient rituals of his higher nature as long as possible. Human abstractions if true usually become ritual.”

“What means more to the life of the individual in our own place in Time than this study of the nature of human nature, the search to discover pertinent traces of hidden impulses of life, to form continually new abstractions uplifting the life he lives?”

“Might not the spirit of creative art, desperately needed by man, lie in the proper use of the radical new technologies of our times, and so arise?”

“This drift toward quantity instead of quality is largely distortion. Conformity is always too convenient? Quality means individuality, is therefore difficult. But unless we go deeper now, quantity at expense to quality will be our national tragedy—the rise of mediocrity into high places.”

“Servility increases—already a seemingly unguarded danger to democracy not only in art and architecture and religion but in all phases of life.”

“Between the radical and the conformist lies all the difference between a lithe tendon and a length of gas-pipe.”

“See the last chapter in Genesis where Cain, the murderer of his brother, went forth with his sons to found the city. The City is still murdering his brother.”

“I then believed critics were by nature no less confused than confusing.”

“Thus the plausible expedient has become gospel and continues to be generally foisted upon those who seek better things; the conformities proclaimed by authority, however specious, temporarily mistaken for Godhead.”

“In every new expression of a fundamental Idea there will always be the substitutes, the imitations, dangling from it, as the soiled fringe from a good garment.”

“Almost all our so-called "modern" is not yet new. It is merely novel by imitation or indirection; or pretense by imported picture.”

“Is false abstraction always the consequence of spiritual degeneration?”

“Creation is not only rare but always hazardous. Always was.”

“As a people we remain comparative strangers to our own life in our own time in our own home: native culture waiting in vain on our door step.”

“For this, if for no other reason, degeneration of creative ability in America has had ample support, and what nobility our society might still have is in danger of being submerged in overwhelming tides of rising conformity.”