John Strausbaugh > Quotes

“The Village would remain the center of the black community in Manhattan through the 1800s, home to the first successful black theater and black newspapers in the country.”
― John Strausbaugh, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village

“The only condition of submission is to submit!… One nation, under one Government, without slavery, has been ordained, and shall stand.” Some”
― John Strausbaugh, City of Sedition: The History of New York City during the Civil War

“At the Artists Club in 1950 he rhythmically intoned his “Lecture on Nothing” for the first time. It was a seemingly rambling, remorselessly monotone meditation on being and nothingness, stillness and action. He began, “I am here, and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” It went on that way for a long time. In his book Silence he recalls that the artist Jeanne Reynal, best known for the painstaking and repetitious art of the mosaic, “stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, ‘John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.’ She then walked out.” When the “lecture” finally ended Cage invited questions; however, to illustrate his feelings about the pointlessness of discussion, he responded only with prewritten answers such as “That is a very good question. I should not want to”
― John Strausbaugh, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village

“a world soul he believes can resist the deadening assaults of modern corporate conformism.”
― John Strausbaugh, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village

“As for why they let him fly in a vehicle they knew to be deeply flawed, we should remember that these may have been good people but they’d never lived a day in a democracy, a place where they were free to speak their minds. They’d spent all their lives, as had their ancestors, in a totalitarian Big Man state where you did not disagree with the Big Man, or did it very, very gingerly, and at no small peril.”
― John Strausbaugh, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned