Sections (TOC) :
• 1
43 Words; 267 Characters
• 2
31 Words; 185 Characters
• 3
35 Words; 207 Characters
• 4
73 Words; 488 Characters
• 5
119 Words; 645 Characters
• 6
110 Words; 668 Characters
• 7
45 Words; 265 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• 1
The enormous public relations industry, from its origins early in this century, has been dedicated to the "control of the public mind," as business leaders described the task. And they acted on their words, surely one of the central themes of modern history.
• 2
...what is admittedly trivial, produced to fill an idle moment with facile emotion or excitement, does not yet reveal something of the mind that likes to be amused in that way.
• 3
Everything in the [French] Second Empire seemed designed for greater convenience; there was even a newspaper, the Naïade, made of rubber -- so that it could be read while wallowing in the bath.
• 4
Each family, nay, each member of each family, has, or soon hopes to have, his own television set and private automobile, the elegant instruments of his estrangement from others. Is it even conceivable for a community to take root in a neighborhood teeming with cars, transistors and television sets, in which character of ordinary people, their eccentricities, their spontaneity, their convictions, their once-intimate gossip have all been dried up by the ever-flickering screen?
• 5
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be 'This book is worthless', while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be 'This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.' But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they? They want some kind of guide to the books they are asked to read, and they want some kind of evaluation. But as soon as values are mentioned, standards collapse.
• 6
You cannot take a purely esthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take sides, and his feelings had to find their way not only into his writing but into his judgments on literature. Literature had to become political, because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty. One's attachments and hatreds were too near the surface of consciousness to be ignored. What books were about seemed so urgently important that the way they were written seemed almost insignificant.
• 7
This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc. are what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.
Chronology :
March 12, 2020 : The Public -- Added.
HTML file generated from :
http://RevoltSource.com/