ids

“He regretted how progress was making people from different cultures more alike in how they dressed and in their political outlook. He noted sadly how ‘places as far apart as the foothills of the Himalayas and the shores of South Sea islands display the same advertisements of mineral waters, soap, and chewing gum’.”
― Richard Evans, Interviewing Hitler: How George Ward Price Became the World's Most Famous Journalist

“In Nietzsche, Reitzel discovered a thinker who blended a merciless realism about the unholy authority of institutionalized religion with the romantic prophecy of a future liberated selfhood.”
― Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

“Time, place and nationality have the power to confer or withhold renown.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“The obvious part is that the machine makes us its captive servants - by its rhythm, by its convenience, by the cost of stopping it or the drawbacks of not using it. As captives we come to resemble it in our pace, rigidity and uniform expectations. But there is in mechanism a subtler influence. The machine is an agent of abstraction. It is itself an abstraction in that it does one particular task (or at most two or three) and yields identical products. There is no fringe or fancy, no happy error or sudden innovation as in the handworker's performance. That is why machine-made things rarely draw our glance more than the few times when they are new and handy. They induce no subsequent reverie, no speculation, and no love, The robot is a repulsive caricature of Man. When the domestic or public landscape is filled with objects deprived of any aura, it is as if the world of living things had been reduced by abstraction to something emphatically not alive.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present