Quotes about spectacles (265 quotes, page 2)

“The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres.”

William Pfaff (1928–2015) American journalist

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 2, The Challenge of Europe, p. 31

“The Roman public's thirst for blood and pleasure in witnessing pain seems to have been unquenchable and without limit." "The caged animals were kept in dungeons below the main arena. The terrified animals in their cages were hoisted up from this pit. And not only animals, human beings too, criminals, slaves and prisoners of war. And here in this arena they were set one upon the other to provide the crowd with spectacles of the most appalling carnage. It still continues to this day in Spain.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

The First Eden (1987)

Pain , War , Pleasure , Animals

“Every human society which has endured long enough to leave records has had elaborate customs and institutions which were effective in instilling into the young the sentiments necessary for its perpetuation. Now for the first time in recorded history Western capitalism offers us a spectacle of a system which not only has given up altogether the task of moral education, but actually employs vast resources and the means of persuasion of unprecedented power to destroy the customs, norms and ideals indispensable for its survival; and to implant fundamentally anti-social attitudes which are incompatible with any reasonable social order. It would be miraculous if a social order which permits such massive anti-socialisation could fail to destroy itself.”

Stanislav Andreski (1919–2007) Polish-British sociologist

Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)

Education , History , Time

“It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 17

Justice , Way , Reality

“Every accessory, every instrument of usefulness, the church has now in such a degree and of such excellence as was never known in any other age; and we want but a supreme and glorious baptism of fire to exhibit to the world such a spectacle as would raise ten thousand hallelujahs to the glory of our King.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 322.

Age , World

“The long-awaited "campaign finance reform" vote finally took place last week, with the House ultimately passing the measure. The debate was full of hypocritical high-minded talk about cleaning up corruption, all by the very politicians of both parties who dole out billions in corporate subsidies and welfare pork. It was quite a spectacle watching the big-spending, perennially-incumbent politicians argue that new laws were needed to protect them from themselves!”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Don't Believe the Hype- "Campaign Finance Reform" Serves Entrenched Interests http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=240 (February 18, 2002).
2000s, 2001-2005

Law , Housing

“Russia’s election spectacle on March 18 isn’t only a domestic distraction. It provides Putin’s defenders in the free world with rhetorical ammunition, as do the approval polls and fake controversies over the fake opposition candidates. There is no form of democratic process or opposition in Putin’s Russia. Pretending otherwise makes you complicit in his propaganda. Stop calling them elections. Stop calling Putin a president. Stop calling to congratulate him on his victories. Let us begin the fight against Putin’s lies with the fundamental truth about what he really is.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, The Truth About Putin (2018)

Truth , World , Victory , Fight

“Last week I watched the Trooping the Colour and our young Queen riding at the head of her Guards. … Certainly no one of British race could contemplate such a spectacle without pride. But no thinking man or woman could escape the terrible question: on what does it all stand? It does indeed seem hard that the traditions and triumphs of a thousand years should be challenged by the ebb and flow of markets and commercial and financial transactions…and that we have to watch from month to month the narrow margins upon which our solvency and consequently our reputation and influence depend. But fifty million islanders growing food for only thirty millions, and dependent for the rest upon their exertions, their skill and their genius, present a problem which has not been seen or at least recorded before. In all history there has never been a community so large, so complex, so sure of its way of life, posed at such dizzy eminence and on so precarious a foundation.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Savoy Hotel, London (11 June 1952), quoted in Winston Churchill, Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952 (London: Cassell & Co, 1953), pp. 298-299
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Life , Food , Way , History

“Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), pp. 4-5

Life , Death , Men , Pain

“The spectacle therefore afforded us by the United States is one of technical brilliance and social blindness.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

In Place of Fear (William Heinemann Ltd, 1952), p. 162
1950s

“Sen. Bob Smith has succeeded in amending an upcoming appropriations bill to beat back the latest wave of Clinton administration disrespect for two key elements of a free citizenry -- privacy and the right to keep and bear arms. Senator Smith is to be praised for keeping his eye on some balls that might have been lost in the smoke of scandal and misinformation that the Clinton Administration seems endlessly to emit. Actually, few things could make the need for vigorous defense of 2nd Amendment rights clearer than the ongoing spectacle of Clinton['s] contempt for the citizens he is supposed to serve. For the 2nd Amendment is really in the Constitution to give men like Bill Clinton something to think about when their ambition gets particularly over-inflated. The Founders added the 2nd Amendment so that when, after a long train of abuses, a government evinces a methodical design upon our natural rights, we will have the means to protect and recover our rights. That is why the right to keep and bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

The reason for the Second Amendment, WorldNetDaily, Aug. 14, 1998. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=18629
1998

Men , Nature , Thinking , Training

“He wanted to win so badly it killed him. But before it killed him, it elevated the game of baseball, at the Polo Grounds, to a grim spectacle of play-war. The analogy fits McGraw. He reminds you more of a battlefield general than he does a sportsman, and if he reminds you of a general, it would be a man who combined the fury of a Patton and the spectacular, yet knowledgeable, flair of MacArthur. Perhaps this desire to win occasionally overflowed its normal limits and became an obsession; perhaps the grimness darkened the sport at times. This was his weakness, for McGraw was not infallible; McGraw was not perfect. Perfection is lifeless, mechanical, uncaring. McGraw was never uncaring. If he was anything, he was a man who cared.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

Hano. Greatest Giants of Them All. p. 250.
Sports-related

War , Game , Knowledge , Sport

“One of the reasons I enjoy going to the Opera is the spectacle of an audience enraptured. Their emotions are engaged, their passions brought to the fore, they become highly sensitive.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Passion

“In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.
“You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.””

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 502)

People , Education , Food , Problem

“A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange - of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow's abstract cost.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son, on Las Vegas, NV
Consider the Lobster (2007)

Money , Pleasure

“Medicine, guarded too by preliminary impediments, and frightful medusa-heads of quackery, which deter many generous souls from entering, is of the half-articulate professions, and does not much invite the ardent kinds of ambition. The intellect required for medicine might be wholly human, and indeed should by all rules be,—the profession of the Human Healer being radically a sacred one and connected with the highest priesthoods, or rather being itself the outcome and acme of all priesthoods, and divinest conquests of intellect here below. As will appear one day, when men take off their old monastic and ecclesiastic spectacles, and look with eyes again! In essence the Physician's task is always heroic, eminently human: but in practice most unluckily at present we find it too become in good part beaverish,—yielding a money-result alone. And what of it is not beaverish,—does not that too go mainly to ingenious talking, publishing of yourself, ingratiating of yourself; a partly human exercise or waste of intellect, and, alas, a partly vulpine ditto;—making the once sacred… Human Healer, more impossible for us than ever!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Men , Money , Exercises , Soul

“The most painful sight I saw in New Orleans was the selling of slaves. Every day in the streets at appointed places, negroes and negresses in holiday attire are exposed for this shameful traffic, like the meanest animals at our fairs. This spectacle oppressed my heart. Lo! I said to myself, these Americans, so proud of their liberty, thus make game of the liberty of others. Poor negroes! I would have wished to buy them all that I might say to them, "Go! Bless Providence. You are free!"”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)

Pain , Game , Holiday , Heart

“Perhaps Archbishop Paul-Émile Léger suffered from what they call in French a taste for the sensational. He was like one of those matadors who, as the cadence of the oles gets more and more rapid, are always trying to find something more daring to do. He grew hasty in his desire to produce new spectacles and maybe did a few ill-considered things. But on the whole I remain impressed with him.”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

on one of his mentors
The Establishment Man by Peter Newman

Suffering

“I'm looking forward to the game because I think it will be a great spectacle. […] He's the type of guy that can pull a rabbit out of the hat every so often and I'll be watching out for that.”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

28-Feb-2009
Sam Allardyce will occasionally liven games up with the odd magic trick.

Guy , Game , Thinking

“We have seen this complete right wing takeover of modern liberalism, and it is an ugly spectacle to behold.”

Kevin Rudd (1957) Australian politician, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

Rudd's first speech as Labor leader
Speaking of John Howard's Liberal government.
2006

“The theatre was full — crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos — hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing — half lava, half glow.I had heard this woman termed "plain," and I expected bony harshness and grimness — something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.For awhile — a long while — I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength — for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public — a milder condiment for a people's palate — than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster — like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.”

Charlotte Brontë book Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Ch. XXIII: Vashi

Death , Hate , People , Feeling

“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

from: English Wikipedia, Joan Miró, 1958, as quoted in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art, ed. Dore Ashton, 1986
1940 - 1960

Sun

“When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

On Dramatic Poetry (1758)

Imagination , Time , Painting

“Nothing in nature or the cosmos is ever completely still — as I write this, several wild Mallards have returned to the Museum courtyard and are creating a frantic spectacle of water and wings as they dive and attack in their annual spring ritual. Further from home, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 56 million light years from Earth has recently been observed to be spinning at close to the speed of light.”

Evalyn Gates (1958)

"Letter from the director", Explore magazine of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (Spring 2013), p. 4

Home , Spring , Nature , Light

“Thus we have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter III : The Failure Of Reform, p. 55

“Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominated world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus' fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle of our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle remains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Source: The Coming Community (1993), Ch. 18 : Shekinah

World , History , Communication , Nature

“Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Beyond a Boundary
Beyond a Boundary (1963)

Dance

“The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we've enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

The Advocate (Feb. 21, 1995)

Rage , Parting

“In each of the cathedral churches there was a bishop, or an archbishop of fools, elected; and in the churches immediately dependent upon the papal see a pope of fools. These mock pontiffs had usually a proper suit of ecclesiastics who attended upon them, and assisted at the divine service, most of them attired in ridiculous dresses resembling pantomimical players and buffoons; they were accompanied by large crowds of the laity, some being disguised with masks of a monstrous fashion, and others having their faces smutted; in one instance to frighten the beholders, and in the other to excite their laughter: and some, again, assuming the habits of females, practised all the wanton airs of the loosest and most abandoned of the sex. During the divine service this motley crowd were not contended with singing of indecent songs in the choir, but some of them ate, and drank, and played at dice upon the altar, by the side of the priest who celebrated the mass. After the service they put filth into the censers, and ran about the church, leaping, dancing, laughing, singing, breaking obscene jests, and exposing themselves in the most unseemly attitudes with shameless impudence. Another part of these ridiculous ceremonies was, to shave the precentor of fools upon a stage erected before the church, in the presence of the populace; and during the operation, he amused them with lewd and vulgar discourses, accompanied by actions equally reprehensible. The bishop, or the pope of fools, performed the divine service habited in the pontifical garments, and gave his benediction to the people before they quitted the church. He was afterwards seated in an open carriage, and drawn about to the different parts of the town, attended by a large train of ecclesiastics and laymen promiscuously mingled together; and many of the most profligate of the latter assumed clerical habits in order to give their impious fooleries the greater effect; they had also with them carts filled with ordure, which they threw occasionally upon the populace assembled to see the procession. These spectacles were always exhibited at Christmas-time, or near to it, but not confined to one particular day.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 345
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Festival of Fools

People , Fools , Sex , Fashion

“To describe this film [Fahrenheit 9/11] as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html: On Michael Moore.
2000s, 2004

Exercises

“The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Creation Myths of Cooperstown", p. 46
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Men , People , History , Effort

“It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality…this is not true…. i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until…i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories…by workers who were mostly exploited…. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to…and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment… [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.”

Carmen Hermosillo Community manager, essayist, poet, research analyst

"Pandora's Vox", as cited in Curtis, Adam, 2011, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC.

Money , People , Fashion , Personality

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Children , People , Books , World

“I believe that new art must differ totally in its manifestation from art as we know it, and people may be very reluctant to accept this. It is perhaps true to say, as someone did of cubism, that 'To sum up: since art is a need to create rather than imitate, the 'cubists' rousing themselves from the sentimentality born of the picturesque aspect of some natural spectacle or other, disengage the fleeting aspects from those which are constant and absolute, and with the aid of these two elements, construct a reality equivalent to that which they see before them'. Thus it is a question of finding the true equivalence (that, offered by Cubism is still not true equivalence), and this can only be 'that which is not nature at all, and is nonetheless one with nature”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

like in Neo-Plasticism / De Stijl
Quote in Mondrian's letter to Lodewijk van Deyssel (who reacted as Dutch art critic on Mondrians essay: 'Le Néo-plasticisme'] Paris, February 1921; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 136
1920's

People , Art , Question , Nature

“Poverty is a terrible thing when it bows to the very ground the pride of the strong man—a terrible thing when it leaves old age destitute: till, the strong man may yet redeem his fortunes, and that old age may have had enjoyment while it was capable of enjoying. But a child, with the step slow from weakness, which from its age should be so buoyant; a cheek thin and white from hunger, at a period which especially cares for food (for all children are greedy); a form shrivelled with cold; a growth stopped by work too laborious for such tender years; a spirit broken by toil, want, and harshness; —is not such a child poverty's most miserable spectacle? It is, however, a common one.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Hunger , Children , Age , Food

“What wonderful weather it has been today, I had not been outside for so long and so I spent the entire day out of doors. Wonderful. Nature is always fresh and new and to stay fresh she is the only thing giving all that is necessary. Everything is rich. I mean, not only the outdoors, landscape or something like that, but simply everything, yes everything except your workplace, and not even excluding that. 'Le spectacle est dans le spectateur' (the spectacle is in the spectator).”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

The Hague, 1881
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Wat heerlijk wêer is 't vandaag geweest, ik was in geen tijd buiten geweest, en ben vandaag de heelen dag buiten gebleven. Maar heerlijk. Frisch en nieuw is de natuur altijd, en om frisch te blijven is zij de eenige die 't noodige geeft, Alles even rijk. ik bedoel niet bepaald het buiten, landschap of zoo iets, maar eenvoudig, ja alles, behalve je werkplaats, en ook die niet uitgezonderd. 'Le spectacle est dans le spectateur.' (Den Haag, 1881)
Quote of Breitner, in his letter to his Maecenas A.P. van Stolk, 12 August 1881, (location: The RKD in The Hague); as quoted by Helewise Berger in Van Gogh and Breitner in The Hague, her Master essay in Dutch - Modern Art Faculty of Philosophy University, Utrecht; Febr. 2008]], (translation from the original Dutch, Anne Porcelijn) p. 4.
this quote of Breitner dates from the years he spent in The Hague; a year later he would regularly sketch in the streets of this city with Vincent van Gogh.
before 1890

Nature , Weather

“We all know it, we already know all the important stuff, like: don't trust politicians, don't trust big business and don't trust the media. Trust your own heart and each other. When you take a breath and look away from the spectacle it's amazing how absurd it seems when you look back.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Russell Brand - The Guardian (2013)

Business , Heart

“…I have given my whole life to newspapers. I am convinced that they have abandoned their functions, and in an abject and ignominious manner, in the present war. Nine-tenths of them, and even more than nine-tenths, print the official blather without any attempt to scrutinize it… It is a disgraceful spectacle, but I do not believe that anything can be done about it. Roosevelt has taken the press into camp as certainly has he has taken the Supreme Court. It has ceased altogether to be independent and has become docilely official.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

June 10, 1944
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

Life , War

“Their football Arsenal is on another level but Spurs are fighting like beavers defending for their lives, It's a terrific game, still one nill" Jeff: "Did I hear that correctly? fighting like beavers? not tigers or lions but beavers those ferocious little devils" Chris: "The game as a spectacle is magnificent. Spurs working like beavers but the football from Arsenal Jeff, well it's out of this world it's sensational, their carving them up as easy as….. well, as easy as anything Jeff”

Chris Kamara (1957) English association football player and manager

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/take-a-tour-of-english-football-grounds-with-chris-kamara-9928156.html

World , Game , Fight , Football

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Moore’s Life of Lord Byron (1830)

“The world has recently been treated for nearly a decade to the unusual spectacle of a great empire deliberately taking every possible step to secure its own destruction, because its citizens were so obsessed by prejudice, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as never to perform the few logical steps necessary for proving that they would shortly be involved in a guerre à outrance, which could be neither averted nor escaped.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Powell's inaugural lecture as Professor of Greek (7 May 1938), from Greek in the University. An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 9.
1930s

World , Thinking

“Think of past wars and of those that subjected people will have to wage to conquer the right to breathe freely, the wars for markets, the wars to create colonial empires. And in France we unfortunately know only too well that every war, victorious or not, is followed by slavery.
And finally what is even worse than all that has just been enumerated, is the fact that the education we all receive from the State, at school and after, has so warped our minds that the very notion of freedom ends up by being lost, and disguised in servitude.
It is a sad sight to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries unleashing their hatred on the anarchist — just because his views on freedom go beyond their petty and narrow concepts of freedom learned in the State school. And meanwhile, this spectacle is a reality. The fact is that the spirit of voluntary servitude was always cleverly cultivated in the minds of the young, and still is, in order to perpetuate the subjection of the individual to the State.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Source: The State — Its Historic Role (1897), IX

War , People , Education , Sadness

“Yes, my friend,’ he said. ‘It is so easy to be an American — here in Paris! A nasal voice — the chewing gum — the little goatee — the horned-rimmed spectacles — all the appurtenances of the stage American…”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

“Magnificent spectacle of human happiness.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

"America", published in The Edinburgh Review (July 1824)

Happiness

“While people will cheer on the spectacle we've made
I'm sitting and sculpting menageries of saints.”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"Jesus Saves, I Spend"
Marry Me (2007)

People

“Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Story of the Malakand Field Force

The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter I
Description of the tribal areas of what is now Pakistan, commonly referred to as Waziristan
Downloadable eText version(s) of this book can be found online http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=9404 at Project Gutenberg
Early career years (1898–1929)

Love , Men , Religion , Mountain

“At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter of fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Man with Two Left Feet (1917)

Cars , Business , Falseness

“…Another highlight of the festival was the performance of the Alchemy Trio in the Tempel Synagogue. That's a great cracovian cellist Dorota Imiełowska with accordion wizard Konrad Ligas and equally sensational bassist Roman Ślazyk. With musicians performed 16-year-old Łukasz Pawlikowski of which can confidently say that he has joined the ranks of the best Polish cellists. Jewish music they played (even in their own arrangement) enchanted, deeply touched and amused, because this music is not only an emotional but also full of humor. It was not just a concert - artists presented musical and theatrical spectacle. Excellent!”

Łukasz Pawlikowski (1997) Polish cellist

...Kolejnym wydarzeniem festiwalu był występ Alchemy Trio w Synagodze Tempel. To znakomita krakowska wiolonczelistka Dorota Imiełowska z czarodziejem akordeonu Konradem Ligasem i równie rewelacyjnym kontrabasistą Romanem Ślazykiem. Z muzykami wystapił 16-letni Łukasz Pawlikowski, o którym śmiało można powiedzieć, że już dołączył do grona najlepszych polskich wiolonczelistów. Muzyka żydowska, którą grali / również we własnej aranżacji/ zachwycała, wzruszała i bawiła, bo to muzyka nie tylko niezwykle emocjonalna, ale i pełna humoru. To był nie tylko koncert - artyści zaprezentowali spektakl muzyczno-teatralny. Rewelacja!
[Beata Penderecka, http://www.radiokrakow.pl/www/index.nsf/ID/BPEA-9AZLHZ, Cellos on Music in Old Cracow, Radio Kraków, 2013-28-08, Polish]
About

Music , Confidence

“So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty." This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

"The Adult, the Artist and the Circus." Vanity Fair (October 1925)

Beauty , Fools , Art , Question

“My skepticism concerning all notions of reconquista is skepticism toward the view that history is restorative. I get older but I do not grow wiser. It is only by shedding skin, by turning pages, by ordering stronger spectacles, by having my hair cut, that I seem to be restoring myself to a circular pattern, that I seem to progress toward youth and capability, though my progress is actually a decline.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Youth , History

“Thus, the distance between any two galaxies increases in time, creating the illusion of mechanical motion. But in reality, galaxies just sit there, contemplating the spectacle of the universe creating more and more space in between them.”

João Magueijo (1967) Portuguese scientist

pg. 87
Faster than the Speed of Light

Reality , Universe , Time

“Following the baptisms, the new Christians return to their homes and come back with their wives and families to be in their turn prepared for baptism. After all had been baptised, I order that the temples of the false Gods be pulled down and idols broken. I know not how to describe in words the joy I feel before the spectacle of pulling down and destroying the idols by the very people who formerly worshipped them.”

Francis Xavier (1506–1552) Navarrese Basque Roman Catholic saint and missionary

Letter dated February 8, 1545, to the Society of Jesus. Quoted from Goel, S. R. (1985). St. Francis Xavier: The man and his mission.

God , People , Family , Feeling

“It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders' motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world. Instead, we are deluding the ignorant and the semi-savage by telling them that no political knowledge is necessary—that our system is only a matter of subjective preference—that any prehistorical form of tribal tyranny, gang rule, and slaughter will do just as well, with our sanction and support. It is thus that we encourage the spectacle of Algerian workers marching through the streets [in the 1962 Civil War] and shouting the demand: "Work, not blood!"—without knowing what great knowledge and virtue are required to achieve it. In the same way, in 1917, the Russian peasants were demanding: "Land and Freedom!" But Lenin and Stalin is what they got. In 1933, the Germans were demanding: "Room to live!" But what they got was Hitler. In 1793, the French were shouting: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!"”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

What they got was Napoleon. In 1776, the Americans were proclaiming "The Rights of Man"—and, led by political philosophers, they achieved it. No revolution, no matter how justified, and no movement, no matter how popular, has ever succeeded without a political philosophy to guide it, to set its direction and goal.
The Ayn Rand Column

War , World , Way , Motivation

“I hold the Prophet of Arabia in great esteem and I can quite understand that it would have been impossible to restrain and wean that illiterate and perverse race, sunk in the miasma of utter moral depravity, from committing the most heinous of crimes, and imbue its people with enthusiasm to strive after righteousness and assimilate high morals and virtues, without projecting such a terrible and intensely awe inspiring spectacle of Hell and an equally captivating and enticing image of a land flowing with milk and honey to represent Heaven before their vision.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Interview (April 1935) in The Genuine Islam, Vol. 1, No. 8 (1936), as quoted at "A Shavian and a Theologian" at World Islamic Mission http://www.wimnet.org/articles/shaviantheo.htm
Disputed

People , Hell , Understanding

“Probably, since human society began, it had seen no such curious spectacle as the houses of the San Francisco millionaires on Nob Hill.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Housing

“It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Love , Men , Soul

“When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave-holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Love , People , Age , Law

“The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sums of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can’t be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening. The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual — that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked — is surely at the core of our culture’s fascination with pornography.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

On Boxing (1987)

Love , Women , Men , Money

“I believe that our people’s traditional belief in the right of trial by jury is in perilous decline. That decline is bound to be confirmed, and indeed accelerated, by the repeated spectacle of a man’s going to his death because a judge found that an aggravating factor existed. We cannot preserve our veneration for the protection of the jury in criminal cases if we render ourselves callous to the need for that protection by regularly imposing the death penalty without it.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Ring v. Arizona (2006) (concurring).
2000s

Death , People , Penalty

“Yesterday I saw Mr. Thackeray. He dined here with some other gentlemen. He is a very tall man — above six feet high, with a peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed, generally somewhat stern and satirical in expression, but capable also of a kind look. He was not told who I was, he was not introduced to me, but I soon saw him looking at me through his spectacles; and when we all rose to go down to dinner he just stepped quietly up and said “Shake hands”; so I shook hands. He spoke very few words to me, but when he went away he shook hands again in a very kind way. It is better, I should think, to have him for a friend than an enemy, for he is a most formidable-looking personage. I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen. All he says is most simple, but often cynical, harsh, and contradictory.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Charlotte Brontë, on William Makepeace Thackeray. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, (by Clement King Shorter) (1896)

Way , Thinking

“The press is a ready example of their efforts, and of the skills they have acquired in this field. They have taken care to steer their members and sympathizers into journalism. And within journalism, they have paid attention to even marginal niches. Consider books. A book by one of them has but to reach a paper, and suggestions of names of persons who would be specially suitable for reviewing it follow. As I mentioned, the editor who demurs, and is inclined to send the book to a person of a different hue is made to feel guilty, to feel that he is deliberately ensuring a biased, negative review. That selecting a person from their list may be ensuring a biased acclamation is talked out. The pressures of prevailing opinion are such, and editors so eager to evade avoidable trouble, that they swiftly select one of the recommended names…
You have only to scan the books pages of newspapers and magazines over the past fifty years to see what a decisive effect even this simple stratagem has had. Their persons were in vital positions in the publishing houses: and so their kind of books were the ones that got published. They then reviewed, and prescribed each other’s books. On the basis of these publications and reviews they were able to get each other positions in universities and the like…. Even positions in institutions which most of us would not even suspect exist were put to intense use. How many among us would know of an agency of government which determines bulk purchases of books for government and other libraries. But they do! So that if you scan the kinds of books this organization has been ordering over the years, you will find them to be almost exclusively the shades of red and pink….
So, their books are selected for publication. They review each other’s books. Reputations are thereby built. Posts are thereby garnered. A new generation of students is weaned wearing the same pair of spectacles – and that means yet another generation of persons in the media, yet another generation of civil servants, of teachers in universities….”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Books , Feeling , Decision , Effort

“Corben's technique introduced the airbrush to comics. His sophisticated knowledge of how color is printed allowed him to get fantastic results. His work has maintained a sense of humor and spectacle in tales of barbarians, time travelers and Arabian nights.|Harvey Kurtzman”

Richard Corben (1940) American illustrator

[Kurtzman, Harvey, From Aargh! to Zap!, Prentice Hall Press, New York, 1991, 88, 978-0-13-363680-2]</ref>}}

Color , Travel , Knowledge , Sense

“…we find and we know that this attempt in Ireland to make the power and influence of the State the means of supporting one creed against another has been the plague and the scourge of the country—has divided man from man, class from class, kingdom from kingdom, and in this great, and ancient, and noble empire has had the effect of now exhibiting us to the world as a divided country—three kingdoms, two of which we are indeed heartily united and associated, but the third of which offers to mankind a spectacle painful and full of schism and destruction within itself, and alienation and estrangement as regards the Throne and Constitution of this realm.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the assembly-rooms at Wavertree (14 November 1868), quoted in The Times (16 November 1868), p. 5
1860s

Pain , World , Support , Country

“Allow me to repeat what I said when you were here: deal with nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, all placed in perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, a section of nature, or if you prefer, of the spectacle spread before our eyes by the 'Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus'. Lines perpendicular to that horizon give depth. But for us men, nature has more depth than surface, hence the need to introduce in our vibrations of light, represented by reds and yellows, enough blue tints to give a feeling of air.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Émile Bernard, 15 April 1904; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 180
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Men , Feeling , Nature , Light

“No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. … I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, for the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1120
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Love , Children , Home , Communication

“It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representatives of the King-Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India and the danger to which white people there are exposed. It can only encourage all the forces which are hostile to British authority.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Council of the West Essex Conservative Association (23 February 1931) on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 390
The 1930s

Hostility , People

“The whole evil of commercial prostitution arises out of the domination of Man in matters of sex. Better indeed were a Saturnalia of free men and women than the spectacle which as it is our great cities present at night. Here in sex, the women's instincts are, as a rule, so clean, so direct, so well-rooted in the needs of the race, that except for man's domination they would scarcely have suffered this perversion.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

Women , Men , Sex , Suffering

“All of us are mere mortals and must consult. The spectacle of Parliament and the antics of our politicians serve only to distract us from the very real problems that we face as a nation.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

NAPF convention, 17 December 2005

Problem

“Have we had the colossal aversion to the world's public assemblies, to its spectacles and all its pomp?”

Louis Tronson (1622–1700) French Roman Catholic priest

Avons-nous eu grande aversion de ses assemblées publiques, de ses spectacles et de toutes ses pompes?
Examens particuliers sur divers sujets, p. 322 http://books.google.com/books?id=esY9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA322
Examens particuliers sur divers sujets [Examination of Conscience upon Special Subjects] (1690)

World

“Just as, in the case of the sunlight, on one who has never from the day of his birth seen it, all efforts at translating it into words are quite thrown away; you cannot make the splendour of the ray shine through his ears; in like manner, to see the beauty of the true and intellectual light, each man has need of eyes of his own; and he who by a gift of Divine inspiration can see it retains his ecstasy unexpressed in the depths of his consciousness; while he who sees it not cannot be made to know even the greatness of his loss. How should he? This good escapes his perception, and it cannot be represented to him; it is unspeakable, and cannot be delineated. We have not learned the peculiar language expressive of this beauty. … What words could be invented to show the greatness of this loss to him who suffers it? Well does the great David seem to me to express the impossibility of doing this. He has been lifted by the power of the Spirit out of himself, and sees in a blessed state of ecstacy the boundless and incomprehensible Beauty; he sees it as fully as a mortal can see who has quitted his fleshly envelopments and entered, by the mere power of thought, upon the contemplation of the spiritual and intellectual world, and in his longing to speak a word worthy of the spectacle he bursts forth with that cry, which all re-echo, "Every man a liar!"”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

I take that to mean that any man who entrusts to language the task of presenting the ineffable Light is really and truly a liar; not because of any hatred on his part of the truth, but because of the feebleness of his instrument for expressing the thing thought of.
On Virginity, Chapter 10

Truth , World , Beauty , Birth

“"I'm no gaun to let naebody see the letter," sobbed the boy, "till I gie't to Mr. Lovel, for I am a faithfu' servant o' the office—if it werena for the powny."
"Very right, my little man," said Ochiltree, turning the reluctant pony's head towards Monkbarns; "but we'll guide him atween us." …
[They met Lovel on the way, ] and Davie, who insisted upon a literal execution of his commission by going on to Monkbarns, was with difficulty prevailed upon to surrender the packet to its proper owner, although he met him a mile nearer than the place he had been directed to. "But my minnie said, I maun be sure to get twenty shillings and five shillings for the postage, and ten shillings and sixpence for the express—there's the paper."
"Let me see—let me see," said Oldbuck, putting on his spectacles, and examining the crumpled copy of regulations to which Davie appealed. "Express, per man and horse, one day, not to exceed ten shillings and sixpence. One day? why, it's not an hour—Man and horse? why, 'tis a monkey on a starved cat!"”

Walter Scott book The Antiquary

Vol. I, Ch.15.
The Antiquary (1816), On the postal service

Way , Boy , Cats , Horse

“The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 264
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Nature , Change

“Stow informs us, that the young Londoners, on holidays, after the evening prayer, were permitted to exercise themselves with their wasters and bucklers before their masters' doors…The bear-gardens were the usual places appropriated by the masters of defence for public trials of skill. These exhibitions were outrageous to humanity, and only fitted for the amusement of ferocious minds; it is therefore astonishing that they should have been frequented by females; for, who could imagine that the slicing of the flesh from a man's cheek, the scarifying of his arms, or laying the calves of his legs upon his heels, were spectacles calculated to delight the fair sex, or sufficiently attractive to command their presence.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 262
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Fencing

Sex , Exercises , Imagination , Holiday

“To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

The Heretic (1968)

Animals

“Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?”

Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) British author, literary critic, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography

The Fortnightly Review, vol. 25 (1876) p. 859

Men , Angels , Problem

“Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.

The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, 'race'. The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are 'prejudiced', 'racialist'... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as 'spouting the fantasies of racial purity' to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of 'racialist' and 'unChristian' and applying them to lifelong political colleagues...

In the universities, we are told that education and the discipline ought to be determined by the students, and that the representatives of the students ought effectively to manage the institutions. This is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense which it is already obligatory for academics and journalists, politicians and parties, to accept and mouth upon pain of verbal denunciation and physical duress.

We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the 'developed' countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced 'aid' to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.

Then there is the 'civil rights' nonsense. In Ulster we are told that the deliberate destruction by fire and riot of areas of ordinary property is due to the dissatisfaction over allocation of council houses and opportunities for employment. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that has not prevented the Parliament and government of the United Kingdom from undermining the morale of civil government in Northern Ireland by imputing to it the blame for anarchy and violence.

Most cynically of all, we are told, and told by bishops forsooth, that communist countries are the upholders of human rights and guardians of individual liberty, but that large numbers of people in this country would be outraged by the spectacle of cricket matches being played here against South Africans. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that did not prevent a British Prime Minister and a British Home Secretary from adopting it as acknowledged fact.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The "enemy within" speech during the 1970 general election campaign; speech to the Turves Green Girls School, Northfield, Birmingham (13 June 1970), from Still to Decide (Eliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 36-37.
1970s

Pain , People , World , Education

“Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.”

Paramahansa Yogananda book Autobiography of a Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 44 - "With Mahatma Gandhi At Wardha

Life , World , Reality , Parting

“The picture of law triumphant and justice prostrate, is not, I am aware, without admirers. To me it is a sorry spectacle. The spirit of justice does not reside in formalities, or words, nor is the triumph of its administration to be found in successfully picking a way between the pitfalls of technicality. After all, the law is, or ought to be, but the handmaid of justice, and inflexibility, which is the most becoming robe of the latter, often serves to render the former grotesque. But any real inroad upon the rights and opportunities for defence of a person charged with a breach of the law, whereby the certainty of justice might be imperilled, I conceive to be a matter of the highest moment.”

James Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance (1816–1899) British judge and rose breeder

Combe v. Edwards (1878), L. R. 3 P. D. 142.

Justice , Law , Way , Personality

“After so many great men have worked on this subject, I almost do not dare to say that I have discovered the universal principle upon which all these laws are based, a principle that covers both elastic and inelastic collisions and describes the motion and equilibrium of all material bodies.
This is the principle of least action, a principle so wise and so worthy of the supreme Being, and intrinsic to all natural phenomena; one observes it at work not only in every change, but also in every constancy that Nature exhibits. In the collision of bodies, motion is distributed such that the quantity of action is as small as possible, given that the collision occurs. At equilibrium, the bodies are arranged such that, if they were to undergo a small movement, the quantity of action would be smallest.
The laws of motion and equilibrium derived from this principle are exactly those observed in Nature. We may admire the applications of this principle in all phenomena: the movement of animals, the growth of plants, the revolutions of the planets, all are consequences of this principle. The spectacle of the universe seems all the more grand and beautiful and worthy of its Author, when one considers that it is all derived from a small number of laws laid down most wisely. Only thus can we gain a fitting idea of the power and wisdom of the supreme Being, not from some small part of creation for which we know neither the construction, usage, nor its relationship to other parts. What satisfaction for the human spirit in contemplating these laws of motion and equilibrium for all bodies in the universe, and in finding within them proof of the existence of Him who governs the universe!”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

Wisdom , Men , Law , Beauty

“What is bigger than an elephant? But this also is become man's plaything, and a spectacle at public solemnities; and it learns to skip, dance, and kneel.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Of Fortune
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Learning , Dance

“If you put together all the ingredients that naturally attract children - sex, violence, revenge, spectacle and vigorous noise - what you have is grand opera.”

Judith Martin (1938) American etiquette expert

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

Children , Sex , Revenge , Nature

“Mr. Owen looked upon men through the spectacles of his own good-nature. He seldom took Lord Brougham's advice "to pick his men." He never acted on the maxim that the working class are as jealous of each other as the upper classes are of them. The resolution he displayed as a manufacturer he was wanting in as a founder of communities…. No leader ever took so little care as Mr, Owen in guarding his own reputation. He scarcely protested when others attached his name to schemes which were not his. The failure of Queenwood was not chargeable to him. When his advice was not followed he would say : "Well, gentlemen, I tell you what you ought to do. You differ from me. Carry out your own plans. Experience will show you who is right." When the affair went wrong then it was ascribed to him. Whatever failed under his name the public inferred failed through him. Mr. Owen was a general who never provided himself with a rear guard. While he was fighting in the front ranks priests might come up and cut off his commissariat. His own troops fell into pits against which he had warned them. Yet he would write his next dispatch without it occurring to him to mention his own defeat, and he would return to his camp without missing his army. Yet society is not so well served that it need hesitate to forgive the omissions of its generous friends. To Mr. Owen will be accorded the distinction of being a philosopher who devoted himself to founding a Science of Social Improvement and a philanthropist who gave his fortune to advance it. Association, which was but casual before his day, he converted into a policy and taught it as an art. He substituted Co-operation for coercion in the conduct ot industry and the willing co-operation of intelligence certain of its own reward, for sullen labour enforced by the necessity of subsistence, seldom to be relied on and never satisfied.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

Men , Art , Intelligence , Communication

“Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether a sections of nature, or, if you prefer, of the spectacle which Pater omnipotens aeterne Deus unfolds before your eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth... Everything I am telling you [ Joachim Gasquet ] about - the sphere, the cone, cylinder, concave shadow – on mornings when I'm tired these notions of mine get me going, they stimulate me, I soon forget them once I start using my eyes.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 163-164, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Nature , Forgetting

“Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled." But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised the question involuntarily arises to what principle, to what final aim these. enormous sacrifices have been offered.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Geschichte Als Schlachtbank
Pt. III, sec. 2, ch. 24 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 22 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Life , Wisdom , People , Truth

“"Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

“The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionable influential; they have extended into modern objects such as airplanes, automobiles, farm machines, etc. Today we are in competition with the 'beautiful object'; it is undeniable. Sometimes its plastic qualities make it beautiful in itself and consequently unusable; one can only fold one's arms and admire it. There is also today an astonishing art of window display. Certain store windows are highly organized spectacles... If, pushing things to extremes, the majority of manufactured objects and 'stored spectacles' were beautiful and had plasticity, we artists would no longer have any reason to exist.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from 'Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life', in 'Kunstblatt', Berlin 1923; as quoted in The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger, in Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, pp. 24-25
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Beauty , Art , Color

“Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 11

Life , Death , Sense , Sport

“She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

Wedding

“A pure Democracy, by which I mean a Society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of Government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 10
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Death , Democracy , Communication , Passion

“The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!”

Carl Bernstein (1944) American journalist

The best obtainable version of the truth http://www.riasberlin.de/rcom-pubs/rcus-pubs-news4-98.html, Carl Bernstein's talk at the annual convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, 1998-09-26.

Reality

“Human nature is such that the spectacle of another's weakness awakens even in the best of us a feeling of power which contains, along with the sincerest pity, an almost imperceptible mingling of pleasure.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Pleasure , Feeling , Nature

“Mere talk makes drama and spectacle unlikely — unless the talk becomes heated and excessive. So it becomes excessive. Not every show features the Crossfire-style food-fight, but it is a tendency on all shows.”

Michael Crichton book State of Fear

State of Fear (2004)

Food , Fight

“And when, as on that day, nine of the greatest masked spirits in the clan came out together it was a terrifying spectacle.
Okonkwo's wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu. But if they thought these things they kept them to themselves. The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 10 (p. 85)

Women , Men , Dead

“To be benevolent in speculation, is often to be selfish in action and in reality. The vanity and the indolence of man delude him into a thousand inconsistencies. He professes to love the name and the semblance of virtue, but the labour of exertion and of self-denial terrifies him from attempting it. The emotions of kindness are delightful to his bosom, but then they are little better than a selfish indulgence—they terminate in his own enjoyment—they are a mere refinement of luxury. His eye melts over the picture of fictitious distress, while not a tear is left for the actual starvation and misery with which he is surrounded. It is easy to indulge the imaginations of a visionary heart in going over a scene of fancied affliction, because here there is no sloth to overcome—no avaricious propensity to control—no offensive or disgusting circumstance to allay the unmingled impression of sympathy which a soft and elegant picture is calculated to awaken. It is not so easy to be benevolent in action and in reality, because here there is fatigue to undergo—there is time and money to give — there is the mortifying spectacle of vice, and folly, and ingratitude, to encounter.”

Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) Scottish mathematician and a leader of the Free Church of Scotland

Source: Discourses on the Christian Revelation viewed in connection with the Modern Astronomy together with his sermons... (1818), P. 175.

Love , Money , Imagination , Reality

“To suppose that chemistry and poetry are incompatible (as I am sure Prof Donnan would not do!), or that biology is inconsistent with a religious outlook on the world (I don not say with theology!) is to misunderstand entirely what the human mind, by contemplation and experiment, has achieved. By extreme specialization at intervals, by overloading the machine to its limit, discoveries and progress are made: but their bearing is best seen by letting the engine idle and giving oneself time to look around. The chemist and the poet are both right, the biologist and the saint: and each must pull up now and then to find whither he is going and to adjust his spectacles.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

World , Time