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“The whole point of a doomsday guided missile was that it would instill the confidence of the citizenry in the defence capabilities of the state, as well as offering a certain diplomatic leverage in international affairs. In short, it had to be known and seen in order to be effective.”
― Fraser MacDonald, Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture

“The fundamental question of philosophy: not 'What is the nature of being? What are the conditions of knowledge? or 'How do I know?' but rather, as Emerson put it, 'How shall I live?”
― Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

“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

“It is all well and good us condemning the journalism of Ward Price or Tucker Carlson or praising the determination of journalists like John Segrue or Norman Ebbutt. But ultimately, it is those of us who consume journalism and social media who have unwittingly created a media environment where proximity to power is valued more highly than the holding of it to account. It is us, as a society, who again and again have responded to the exposure of populists’ lies and contradictions with little more than a collective shrug. The truth is that there will always be George Ward Prices – journalists who have extreme political beliefs, who are prepared to put their careers over the public interest, or both. Until we learn the lesson of the dark path down which Ward Price’s brand of journalism can lead, we will continue to see journalism that divides us by appealing to our worst instincts have precedence over journalism that does the difficult and complex work of shining a light that helps us better understand our world.”
― Richard Evans, Interviewing Hitler: How George Ward Price Became the World's Most Famous Journalist