text:
Sexuality

Human sexuality refers to the expression of sexual sensation and related intimacy between human beings, as well as the expression of identity through sex and as influenced by or based on sex.

Quotes

 * Alphabetized by author

 * Although humans tend to view sex as mainly a fun recreational activity sometimes resulting in death, in nature it is a far more serious matter.
 * Dave Barry, "Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys"

 * I see the birth of a new-boy system instead of the old-boy system. The new-boy system consists of athletic men who are self-confident and intelligent enough to be supportive of women, particularly those with their own self-confidence, sexual athleticism and intelligence. Men find these qualities in me a "turn on".
 * Suzy Chaffee quoted in Machisma: Women & Daring, by Grace Lichtenstein (1981)

 * No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
 * Cyril Connolly. The Unquiet Era, 1944

 * Women need a reason to have sex while all men need is a place.
 * Billy Crystal The Oprah Winfrey Show

 * As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, 'Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous.' Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.
 * Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct, 1941

 * Sexually transmitted diseases, ranging from the serious to the fatal, are a fact of life in high schools and neighborhoods across the country. Misinformation and scare tactics about common sexual practices like masturbation are rampant. Despite these facts, and despite parents' overwhelming desire for their children to receive detailed sex education at school as well as at home, our society remains unwilling to make sexuality part of a comprehensive health education program in the schools and anxious to the point of hysteria about young people and sex...Hysteria about sex has hindered attempts to address these pressing concerns, and the people hurt most are those who most need the information—our young people, the poor, and the uninformed. Ignorance is not bliss.
 * Joycelyn Elders, forward to Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068 pp. ix, x.   In contrast to Elders' views, Judith Reisman has stated that "The damage done to children from sexual relations with adults-what the public thought was molestation-was almost always, in Kinsey's view, the result of overreaction and hysteria by parents, schoolteachers, police, etc. But one aspect of Kinsey's research was completely missed by everyone. That was the criminal childhood sexuality experimentation which formed the basis of Kinsey's conclusions on childhood sexual potential. The results of these experiments are the basis for beliefs on childhood sexuality held and taught by academic sexologists today." Judith Reisman, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People (1990), Judith Reisman, Huntington House, Lafayette, LA.  ISBN 091031120X p. 3.

 * The twenty-first century has seen wider acknowledgment of the fact that human sexuality is much more complex than the rigid and unchanging categories of heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual can express; the experiences of trans people are just one part of this increased sexual diversity. In the case of non-binary people – whose gender identities and expressions may sit outside of the categories of man and woman, or move between the two – the nineteenth-century categories of human sexuality make little sense – which is why the term ‘queer’ has risen in popularity.
 * Shon Faye, Chapter Six

 * Sexual frustration is the single most powerful force in the world. We are the only species where that frustration affects things like the amount of money given to the poor and the length of welfare lines. I hate that the fact that George Bush's wife is an ugly old piece of shit could cause suffering among millions and could cause wars. I don't think it's any coincidence that Kennedy was the last president who had a wife worth fucking and he was the last good president.
 * John Frusciante Spin Magazine Interview, Feb, 1990.

 * It’s the strange thing about this church, it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we with our permissive society and our rude jokes, we are obsessed. No, we have a healthy attitude, we like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly, because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult, it’s a bit like food in that respect only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.
 * Stephen Fry, "The Catholic church is a force for good in the world", Intelligence Squared Catholic Church Debate, (November 7th 2009).

 * Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts... There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error.
 * John Gagnon, "The Eplicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", 1990

 * It is precisely because I believe it is not possible to neatly separate the sexual from other sorts of relations that I find the movement to bar the sexual from pedagogy not only dangerous but supremely impractical.
 * Jane Gallop, "Feminism and Harassment Policy"

 * The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors. . . The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact that rests on a grave mistake, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heterosexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.
 * Rolf Gindorf, "Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event", 1977

 * However much people might be enlightened about their own sexuality, indeed about sexuality in general, there is always in them a modicum of some subconscious aversion to the knowledge that their own parents too are beings with the same kind of sexual needs and desires, which they actually put into practice, more or less regularly. Everyone knows that they weren’t brought by the stork, and yet, where it is the actual sex act that is at issue, as far as it concerns their own parents, most people would rather that they had been.
 * Stanka Gjurić, "The Lesson of Impudence"

 * When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
 * Matt Groening, From "Basic Sex Facts For Today's Youngfolk" In Life In Hell

 * The loneliest place in this world is the no-man's-land of sex.
 * Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928), Book 1, Chapter 8.3

 * Maybe God isn't the sex police, Richard. Sometimes I think Christians get all hung up on the sex thing because it's easier to worry about sex than to ask yourself, am I a good person? […] It makes it easy to be cruel, because as long as you're not fucking around, nothing you do can be that bad. Is that really all you think of God?
 * Anita Blake, to Richard Zeeman

 * There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large.
 * Woody Harrelson, Play it to the Bone

 * Social and cultural factors very broadly channel and limit sexual variation in human populations. Sexual laws, codes, and roles do restrict the range and intensity of sexual practices, as far as we can judge from the cross-cultural literature (Herdt and Stoller 1990). Kinsey lent his support to this view; Ford and Beach (1950) documented it in surveys; and Margaret Mead (1961) did so in her ethnographic studies. But biosocial, genetic, and hormonal predispositions also broadly limit and channel. Each culture's theory of the combination of these social and biological contraints we could call its theory of human sexual nature. Yet none of these broad principles, nor the local theory of human sexual nature, entirely explains or predicts a particular person's sexual desires or behaviors. A sexual behavior, that is, does not necessarily indicate an erotic orientation, preference, or desire. The homosexual is not the same as the homoerotic; whether in our society or one very exotic, I will claim, we can distinguish the homosexual from the homoerotic, as Oscar Wilde's case first hinted.
 * Gilbert Herdt, "Bisexuality and the Causes of Homosexuality: The Case of the Sambia"

 * Nobody knows what "causes" homosexuality any more than they know what "causes" heterosexuality. (Of course, there is far less interest in what causes the latter.) Overtly, the old psychoanalytic bugaboos are dead; there is no evidence, according to the Kinsey Institute, that male homosexuality is caused by dominant mothers and/or weak fathers, or that female homosexuality is caused by girls' having exclusively male role models. Furthermore, children who are raised by gay and lesbian couples are no more likely to be homosexual than children of heterosexual couples. Nor do people become adult homosexuals because they were seduced by older people or went to same-sex boarding schools... Though the causes of sexual orientation are unknown and the definitions fluid, the likelihood of converting a homosexual to a heterosexual orientation, or vice versa, is very slight. Some homosexual men and women voluntarily come for therapy to change from same-sex to opposite-sex partners, but it is not clear whether the limited "success" rate refers to a change in their feelings and the pattern of their desire, or just in their ability to consciously restrict their sexual contact to members of the opposite sex.
 * Patricia Hersch, The Family Therapy Networker (Jan/Feb 1991)

 * No person may enjoy outstanding success without good health. Many of the causes of ill health are subject to mastery and control. These, in the main are: a. Overeating of foods not conducive to health. b. Wrong habits of thought... c. Wrong use of, and over indulgence in sex. d. Lack of proper physical exercise e. An inadequate supply of fresh air, due to improper breathing.... The most damaging forms of intemperance are connected with eating, strong drink, and sexual activities. Overindulgence in any of these is fatal to success...
 * Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1938)

 * Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.
 * Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress

 * The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species.
 * Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

 * The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.
 * Alfred Kinsey, in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

 * Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
 * Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

 * Women find it easier to talk about eroticism, sensuality and relationships than men. I think men tend to cover up their feelings by using locker room macho talk.
 * Cheryl Ladd, Cheryl Ladd satisfied with 'Crossings', Reading Eagle, February 23, 1986

 * Sex isn't disgusting unless you make it disgusting!
 * Bob Leander, Paris, je t'aime

 * Sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle to self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness. There are many ways even the smallest children can partake of it. Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child—for accomplishment, connection, meaning, and pleasure—can be marvelously fulfilled.
 * Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, forward by Joycelyn Elders, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068 Epilogue, p. 225.

 * Sexual play was a regular practice among the children from the earliest period. The adult attitude toward it, if not one of active encouragement, was at least that of mild amusement. [...] Regular intercourse began before puberty with patterns of group sexual play, two or three girls in the gang serving a number of boys in rapid succession with the other boys looking on. Occasionally there were individual affairs. Sexual techniques were learned through imitation of the adults. [...] Homosexuality was present in the form of mutual masturbation, but I have no data as to its frequency. [...] The gap between adults and children was such that it was impossible for an adult to win the child’s confidence. Relations between them were amiable but entirely dissociated.
 * Ralph Linton [Linton, Ralph. Marquesan Culture (July 1925), American Anthropologist Volume 27. Issue 3 (p. 474-478)]

 * It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick', Here is the material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination....The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. This was aggravated, of course, by the Puritan policy of rigorously suppressing all the natural outlets of excuberant feeling--music, laughter, colour, pageantry, and so on. To observe Christmas Day was once a prison offence....
 * H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Robert E. Howard, (October 4, 1930),

 * I just think it's double standards the whole time. On the one hand people say, 'Oh, women have equal rights now, women can be as powerful as men and do the same jobs as men', but we're still not allowed to talk about sex, 'cos that's unladylike. It's like that old thing, if a man has slept with loads and loads of women, he's a stud. But if a woman has slept with loads of boys, she's a slag. Well, why? Why? What makes a man a stud 'cos he's pulled loads of women? And what makes me a slag 'cos I've slept with more than 10 men? It's ridiculous!
 * Jodie Marsh 'The Guardian, 25 January 2006
 * Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.
 * Alan Moore, "BOG VENUS VERSUS NAZI COCK-RING: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography" in Arthur magazine, Vol. 1, No. 25 (November 2006)

 * The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.
 * Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Epigram 75, translated by Walter Kaufmann

 * Writers may note that some pictures have succeeded without sex appeal. First of all, the pictures of Charlie Chaplin. Then those of Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd. Then Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. Then come occasional pictures, with lesser stars, such as The Covered Wagon, The Big Parade, The Four Horsemen, and so on. Have all of these anything in common? Only one feature stands out unmistakably. In every one of them, sex interest is completely submerged. It is subordinated to character drawing, or to complications, or to sheer spectacle. Whenever you find a romance here, it is thin and tacked onto something far bigger or far funnier. And you find no trace of red hot sex appeal, such as Pola Negri injected into the screen.
 * Walter B. Pitkin and William M. Marston, “The Art of Sound Pictures” D. Appleton and Company, New York London (1930), CHAPTER II WHAT PEOPLE WANT, p. 21.

 * Here we see reflected the curious conglomerate of humanity which makes up the world's picture audience. Most of its members are young people, many of them children under twelve years of age. The latter do not respond violently to sex appeal. And the adolescents respond unpleasantly to it, on the whole; they are just growing into sex life, and it sets up "growing pains." Frank, suggestive pictures embarrass some boys and girls between the years of twelve and eighteen. This is partly a by-product of Puritanism, at a time when profound psychic changes are taking place. Now enters still another factor to block the normal interest in sex appeal stories. The motion picture house is a family gathering place.
 * Walter B. Pitkin and William M. Marston, “The Art of Sound Pictures” D. Appleton and Company, New York London (1930), CHAPTER II WHAT PEOPLE WANT, p. 22.

 * Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual's capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1927), General Survey.

 * Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Ch. V : The Development of the Character-Analytic Technique.

 * Sigmund Freud’s second great discovery was that even the small child develops a lively sexuality, which has nothing to do with procreation; that, in other words, sexuality and procreation, and sexual and genital, are not the same. The analytic dissection of psychic processes further proved that sexuality, or rather its energy, the libido, which is of the body, is the prime motor of psychic life. Hence, the biologic presuppositions and social conditions of life overlap in the mind. The third great discovery was that childhood sexuality, of which what is most crucial in the child-parent relationship (‘the Oedipus complex’) is a part, is usually repressed out  of fear of punishment for sexual acts and thoughts (basically a ‘fear of castration’); the child’s sexual activity is blocked and extinguished from memory. Thus, while repression  of childhood sexuality withdraws it from the influence of consciousness, it does not weaken its force. On the contrary, the repression intensifies it and enables it to manifest itself in various pathological disturbances of the mind. As there is hardly an exception to this rule among ‘civilized man’, Freud could say that he had all of humanity as his patient.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), p. 26.

 * It was not until relatively late, with the establishment of an authoritarian patriarchy and the beginning of the division of the classes, that suppression of sexuality begins to make its appearance. It is at this stage that sexual interests in general begin to enter the service of a minority’s  interest in material profit; in the patriarchal marriage and family this state of affairs  assumes a solid organizational form. With the restriction and suppression of sexuality, the  nature of human feeling changes; a sex-negating religion comes into being and gradually develops its own sex-political organization, the church with all its predecessors, the aim  of which is nothing other than the eradication of man’s sexual desires and consequently of what little happiness there is on earth.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), p. 29.

 * The moral inhibition of the child’s natural sexuality, the last stage of which is the severe impairment of the child’s genital sexuality, makes the child afraid, shy, fearful of authority, obedient, ‘good’, and ‘docile’ in the authoritarian sense of the words. It has a crippling effect on man’s rebellious forces because every vital life-impulse is now burdened with severe fear; and since sex is a forbidden subject, thought in general and man’s critical faculty also become inhibited. In short, morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. Thus, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later. Man’s authoritarian structure - this must be clearly established - is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexual impulses.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), p. 30.

 * When sexuality is prevented from attaining natural gratification, owing to the process of sexual repression, what happens is that it seeks various kinds of substitute gratifications. Thus, for instance, natural aggression is distorted into brutal sadism, which constitutes an essential part of the mass-psychological basis of those imperialistic wars that are instigated by a few. To give another instance: From the point of view of mass psychology, the effect of militarism is based essentially on a libidinous mechanism. The sexual effect of a uniform, the erotically provocative effect of rhythmically executed goose-stepping, the exhibitionistic nature of militaristic procedures, have been more practically comprehended by a salesgirl or an average secretary than by our most erudite politicians. On the other hand it is political reaction that consciously exploits these sexual interests. It not only designs flashy uniforms for the men, it puts the recruiting into the hands of attractive women. In conclusion, let us but recall the recruiting posters of war-thirsty powers, which ran something as follows: ‘Travel to foreign countries — join the Royal Navy I’ and the foreign countries were portrayed by exotic women. And why are these posters effective? Because our youth has become sexually starved owing to sexual suppression.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), p. 31.

 * At this point the obvious objection makes itself heard, namely, that the primitive who led a natural life in a matriarchal order also had mystical feelings. A very thorough proof is needed to show that there is a fundamental difference between the matriarchal man and the patriarchal man. Above all, this can be proven by the fact that religion’s attitude towards sexuality underwent a change in patriarchal society. Originally, it was a religion of sexuality; later it became an anti-sexual religion. The ‘mysticism’ of the primitives who were members of a sexually affirmative society is partially direct orgastic experience and partially animistic interpretation of natural processes.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), p. 138.

 * Clinical experience shows incontestably that religious sentiments result from inhibited sexuality that the source of mystical excitation is to be sought in inhibited sexual excitation. The inescapable conclusion of all this is that a clear sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life must foredoom every form of mysticism; that, in other words, natural sexuality is the arch enemy of mystical religion. By carrying on an anti-sexual fight wherever it can, making it the core of its dogmas and putting it in the foreground of its mass propaganda, the church only attests to the correctness of this interpretation.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), p. 178.

 * It was first shown in connection with the suppression of the natural sexuality of children and adolescents that there are fundamental biologic functions of the human animal that have nothing to do with the economic distribution of the classes and that class boundaries overlap and cut across one another. The suppression of sexuality relates not only to all strata and classes of every patriarchal society; it is precisely in the ruling classes that this suppression is often most pronounced. Indeed, sex-economy was able to show that a large part of the sadism made use of by the ruling class to suppress and exploit other classes is to be ascribed chiefly to the sadism that stems from suppressed sexuality.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), ch. 10; originally published in International Journal of Sex-Economy and Orgone-Research, 2 (1943).

 * Well, there’s always this human instinct about that, even from a very, very young age. I agreed that we are born with a sort of innate sexuality. But by like age 11, girls were talking about what they had and hadn’t done. I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet, so it always made me feel insecure, like I was never gonna be good or ready or know what to do — I didn’t even have boobs.
 * Rihanna A Very Revealing Conversation With Rihanna

 * Were kisses all the joys in bed, one woman would another wed.
 * William Shakespeare, "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music IV"

 * Isn’t it desperately sad that, at a time when we face formidable problems – poverty, HIV/AIDS, conflict – that the Anglican Communion can invest so much energy on disagreements about human sexuality? A communion that used to boast that one of its distinctive characteristics was something called comprehensiveness, that our communion, the Anglican Church, included just about everybody. Even if you had the most weird theology you could come in, you were allowed. And now we, who used to be held up in admiration by many because of this inclusiveness, are now spending time working out how we can excommunicate one another. God looks on and God weeps. God weeps.
 * Desmond Tutu, "And God Smiles," sermon preached at All Saints Church, Pasadena, California (6 November 2005)

 * Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer. ..
 * David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"

 * There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration).
 * Ellen Willis, "Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life" (1979), Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)

 * These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power.
 * Ellen Willis, "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?" (1981), No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992)

 * In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. 'Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want'' tyrants.
 * Robert Anton Wilson, in Everything Is Under Control : Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998), p. 361; some of Wilson's account of the suppression of Reich's ideas and work are technically exaggerative: though many of Reich's books mentioning his concepts of orgone energy and the "orgone accumulators" of his laboratory were destroyed the destruction of his equipment and books was not actually total.

title: Sexuality


text:
Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford (19 October 1895 – 26 January 1990) was an American historian of technology and science, also noted for his study of cities.

Quotes

 * It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
 * The Story of Utopias, Chapter One (1922).

 * Max Beer, in his History of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in heaven tomorrow. Beer points out that More, on the other hand, looked to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is, as Beer sees, that these two conceptions are still at war with each other: idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet "the happiness of man on earth" depends upon their combination.
 * The Story of Utopias, Chapter Twelve (1922).

 * The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.
 * "The Origins of the American Mind" in The Golden Day (1926).

 * (The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.
 * "The Theory and Practice of Regionalism" in The Sociological Review, vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2, 1928.

 * The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.
 * "The Drama of the Machines" in Scribner's Magazine (August 1930)

 * Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded... on the principle of conspicuous waste.
 * Lewis Mumford (1930) Modern American design. R.L. Leonard, & C.A. Glassgold (eds.), American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen. p. 9; As cited in: V.T. Clayton et al. Drawing on America's Past, p. 28

 * Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
 * The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895 (1931), p. 3

 * If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will — and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievements — we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And values do not come ready-made: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to square the facts of one's own experience with the historic patterns formed in the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing values. If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds.
 * Values for Survival (1946)

 * Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.
 * Values for Survival (1946)

 * Let us confess it: the human situation is always desperate.
 * In the Name of Sanity (1954)

 * Today, all the normal mischances of living have been multiplied, a million-fold, by the potentialities for destruction, for an unthinking act of collective suicide, which man's very triumphs in science and invention have brought about. In this situation the artist has a special task and duty: the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
 * In the Name of Sanity (1954)

 * I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.
 * As quoted in "Lewis Mumford Remembers" by Carey Winfrey in The New York Times (6 July 1977)

 * I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"
 * Address to the National Book Awards Committee, published in My Works and Days (1979)

 * Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... The world, at that moment, opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch.
 * Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (1982), p. 130

 * The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.
 * As quoted in Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972) by Anne Chisholm

 * One of the marks of maturity is the need for solitude: a city should not merely draw men together in many varied activities, but should permit each person to find, near at hand, moments of seclusion and peace.
 * "Planning for the Phases of Life", The Urban Prospect: Essays (1968)

Technics and Civilization (1934)

 * The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.
 * Ch. 1, sct. 2

 * Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire paleotechnic period was ruled, from beginning to end, by the policy of blood and iron. The brutal contempt for life was equalled only by the the almost priestly ritual it developed for inflicting death. Its "peace" was indeed the peace that passeth understanding: what was it but latent warfare.
 * Ch. 4, sct. 5

 * In his discussion on slavery Aristotle said that when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief workmen would not need helpers nor masters slaves. At the time he wrote, he believed that he was establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today he was in reality justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of man's interaction with his environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and the lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. But work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which... the Athenians so properly despised—work in these forms is the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentially... is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical developments of the last thousand years.
 * Ch. 6, sct. 4

 * That was the danger Samuel Butler jestingly prophesied in Erewhon, the danger that the human being might become a means whereby the machine perpetuated itself and extended its dominion.
 * Ch. 6, sct. 9

 * The recoil from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural developments—even those developments that most closely derive from the organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had nothing to learn from mechanism.
 * Ch. 6, sct. 9

 * On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.
 * Ch. 6, sct. 9

 * Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
 * Chapter 6, § 9

 * War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
 * Ch. 6, sct. 11

 * 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.
 * Ch. 6, sct. 11

 * Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
 * Ch. 8, sct. 12

 * However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.
 * Ch. 8, sct. 13

The Culture of Cities (1938)

 * The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
 * Introduction

 * Today our world faces a crisis: a crisis which, if its consequences are as grave as now seems, may not fully be resolved for another century. If the destructive forces in civilization gain ascendancy, our new urban culture will be stricken in every part. Our cities, blasted and deserted, will be cemeteries for the dead: cold lairs given over to less destructive beasts than man. But we may avert that fate: perhaps only in facing such a desperate challenge can the necessary creative forces be effectually welded together. Instead of clinging to the sardonic funeral towers of metropolitan finance, ours to march out to newly plowed fields, to create fresh patterns of political action, to alter for human purposes the perverse mechanisms or our economic regime, to conceive and to germinate fresh forms of human culture. Instead of accepting the stale cult of death that the Fascists have erected, as the proper crown for the servility and brutality that are the pillars of their states, we must erect a cult of life: life in action, as the farmer or mechanic knows it: life in expression, as the artist knows it: life as the lover feels it and the parent practices it: life as it is known to men of good will who meditate in the cloister, experiment in the laboratory, or plan intelligently in the factory or the government office.
 * Introduction

 * Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us. Those images may easily be smashed by an external shock, cracked as ignominiously as the fallen Dagon, the massive idol of the heathen; or they may be melted, eventually, by the internal warmth of normal men and women. Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal. As life becomes insurgent once more in our civilization, conquering the reckless thrust of barbarism, the culture of cities will be both instrument and goal.
 * Introduction

 * Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
 * Ch. 1, sct. 5

 * The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
 * Ch. 7, sct. 16

Faith for Living (1940)

 * ...in general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative; pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
 * Often quoted as "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.", e.g, Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 112.

 * Man's chief purpose...is the creation and preservation of values: that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.

 * The individual contribution, the work of any single generation, is infinitesimal; the power and glory belong to human society at large, and are the long result of selection, conservation, sacrifice, creation, and renewal — the outcome of endless brave efforts to conserve values and ideas, and to hand them on to posterity, along with physical life itself. Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back into an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.

 * The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.

 * A community whose life is not irrigated by art and science, by religion and philosophy, day upon day, is a community that exists half alive.

 * The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

The Conduct Of Life (1951)

 * Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic energies, if they are handled by disoriented and demoralized men?
 * THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL: The Promise of Our Age

 * We arrest our inner creativity with external compulsions and irrelevant anxieties, at the mercy of constant interruptions by telephone and radio and insistent print, timing our lives to the movement of a production belt we do not control. At the same time, we give authority to the stomach, the muscles, the genitals--to animal reflexes that produce obedient consumers, whip-wielding man-trainers, slavish political subjects, push-button automatons.
 * CHALLENGE: Diagnosis of Our Times

 * Thus the inertia of "progress" today leads swiftly downhill; while the attempt while the attempt to achieve stabilization by collective compulsion and social arrest likewise leads to the same destination--death. Only one road lies open to those who would remain human: the road of renewal. Each one of us must dedicate himself, at whatever effort, with whatever willing sacrifice, to such a transformation of himself and all the groups and associations of in which he participates, as will lead to law and order, to peace and cooperation, to love and brotherhood, throughout the planet.
 * CHALLENGE: Alternatives to Catastrophe

 * Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.
 * Ch. 1

 *  Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

 * By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
 * "The Challenge of Renewal"

 * We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.
 * "The Fulfillment of Man"

 * Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
 * "The Way and the Life"

The City in History (1961)

 * Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
 * Ch. 18

 * The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
 * Ch. 18

 * Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the city continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.
 * Sprawling Giantism

 * Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.
 * Myth of Megalopolis

 * In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”
 * pg 486

The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970)

 * 2 Volumes: Technics and Human Development (1967) and The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Technics and Human Development (1967)

 * This essential coalition between royal military power and often dubious supernatural authority anticipated a similar alliance between the scientists and mathematical games theorists with the higher agents of government today, and was subject to similar corruptions, miscalculations, and hallucinations.
 * pg 176

The Pentagon of Power (1970)

 * If, as many anthropologists still hold, the making and using of tools as one of the chief sources of primitive man's intellectual development, is it not time that we asked ourselves what will happen to man if he departs as completely as he now threatens to do from his primal polytechnic occupations? Since they can no longer be pursued at a profit, perhaps they will have to be restored as modes of sport and recreation, even more as helpful — increasingly essential — forms of personal service and mutual aid.
 * Technical Liberation

 * In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.
 * pg 397

 * The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality...
 * Technical Liberation

 * In my own household, for example, an electric refrigerator has been in service for nineteen years, with only a single minor repair: an admirable job. Both automatic refrigerators for daily use and deepfreeze preservation are inventions of permanent value. Though one cannot bestow any such unqualified commendation upon the design of the contemporary motor car, one can hardly doubt that if biotechnic criteria were heeded, rather than those of market analysts and fashion experts, an equally good product might come forth from Detroit, with an equally long prospect of continued use.
 * Megatechnic Costs and Benefits

 * But what would become of mass production and its system of financial expansion if technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and human satisfaction were the guiding aims. The very conditions for current financial success — constantly expanding production and replacement — works against these ends. To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year.
 * Megatechnic Costs and Benefits

 * What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?
 * p. 352

 * If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems). What can be known about life only through the process of living — and so is part of even the humblest organisms — must be added to all the other aspects that can be observed, abstracted, measured. … Once an organic world picture is in the ascendant, the working aim of an economy of plenitude will be not to feed more human functions into the machine, but to develop further man's incalculable potentialities for self-actualization and self-transendence, taking back into himself deliberately many of the activities he has too supinely surrendered into the mechanical system.

 * As opposed to [megatechnics], an organic system directs itself to qualitative richness, amplitude, spaciousness, free from quantitative pressure and crowding, since self-regulation, self-correction, and self-propulsion are as much an integral property of organisms as nutrition, reproduction, growth, and repair. Balance, wholeness, completeness, continuous interplay between inner and outer, the subjective and the objective aspects of existence are identifying characteristics of the organic model; and the general name for an economy based on such a model is an economy of plenitude.

Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972 (1973)

 * Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.
 * "Revolt of the Demons", p. 399

 * The relation between psyche and soma, mind and brain, are peculiarly intimate; but, as in marriage, the partners are not inseparable: indeed their divorce was one of the conditions for the mind's independent history and its cumulative achievements. But the human mind possesses a special advantage over the brain: for once it has created impressive symbols and has stored significant memories, it can transfer its characteristic activities to materials like to stone and paper that outlast the original brain's brief life-span. When the organism dies, the brain dies, too, with all its lifetime accumulations. But the mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.
 * "The Mindfulness of Man", p. 424

My Works and Days (1979)

 * Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream?
 * Ch. 2

 * There is no necessary connection between the important events of a life and the records of it that have been preserved in memory, in documents, in memorials, or in living testimony. The biographer must compose his life of what he has, just as the archeologist must restore his temple or his statue with such fragments as thieving time and careless men have left him; but fate often ironically leaves him a well-preserved leg and a dismembered torso, while the head, which would supply the main clue to the body, is missing. Hence, in addition to the purposive selection exercised by the subject himself and by the biographer in making use of such materials as are left, there exists a purely external selection dominated by chance, which cuts across the evidence in an arbitrary fashion. To correct for such distortions the biographer must be an anatomist of character: he must be able to restore the missing nose in plaster, even if he does not find the original marble.
 * Ch. 14

 * Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

 * New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

Misattributed

 * A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm.
 * John Neal, as quoted in The Journal of Education for Upper Canada Vol. III (1850)

Quotes about Mumford

 * Lewis Mumford, with whose writings my own ideas have many points in common, says this about our contemporary civilization: "The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastraphes, it is not humanly interesting...In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of choice, incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible as his choices become fewer and fewer..."
 * Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)

 * Utopian systems have among their motive forces the acquisition of power for a small group for the purpose of making human destiny "secure," "scientific." This type of thinking has so permeated the minds of our intellectuals that even when they oppose an artificial rigidification of history, all they can propose is—another Utopia. A few years ago Mr. Lewis Mumford published a book entitled The Transformations of Man, in which he recommended, in view of spreading "world culture" among "posthistoric men," denationalized governments, detheologized religions, and world-citizens turned policemen to extirpate what he calls "outbreaks of private and collective criminality."
 * Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961) Ch. 11 "Intellectual and Philosopher"

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Lewis Mumford


text:
Violence

Violence is any act of aggression and/or abuse that causes or intends to cause injury to persons, animals, or property. It may include random violence, (such as unpremeditated or small-scale violence) and coordinated violence (such as actions carried out by sanctioned or unsanctioned violent groups -- including war, revolution, or terrorism).

A

 * In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
 * On the subject violence and power. Source: On Violence, published in 1970. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. It is the only resort by which incompetent men can thrive. The bully, the brute, the dictator.
 * Isaac Asimov, Foundation, Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1942, (This appears three times in "Bridle and Saddle" which is titled "The Mayors" in the 1951 novelization). It plays on the famous quote by Samuel Johnson (1775): "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

B

 * The "hard law of value," the "law set in stone"—when it abandons us, what sadness, what panic! This is why there are still good days left to fascist and authoritarian methods, because they revive something of the violence necessary to life—whether suffered or inflicted. The violence of ritual, the violence of work, the violence of knowledge, the violence of blood, the violence of power and of the political is good! It is clear, luminous, the relations of force, contradictions, exploitation, repression! This is lacking today, and the need for it makes itself felt.
 * Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), p. 156

 * I had long put on one side the purist pacifist view that one should have nothing to do with a social revolution if any violence were involved... Nevertheless, the conviction remained in my mind that any revolution would fail to establish freedom and fraternity in proportion to its use of violence, that the use of violence inevitably brought in its train domination, repression, cruelty.
 * Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left (1942), also quoted in Martin Ceadel, Pacifism In Britain 1914-1945: The Defining of a Faith, Clarendon Press, 1980.

 * No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge — it's deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights.
 * Judith Butler, The Believer, Interview - Issue 2.

 * Peace is a resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.
 * Judith Butler, The Believer, Interview - Issue 2.

 * Violence as a tool is already operating in the world before anyone takes it up: that fact alone neither justifies nor discounts the use of the tool. What seems most important, however, is that the tool is already part of a practice, presupposing a world conducive to its use; that the use of the tool builds or rebuilds a specific kind of world, activating a sedimented legacy of use. When any of us commit acts of violence, we are, in and through those acts, building a more violent world.
 * Judith Butler,

 * Quite apart from assiduous efforts to restrict the use of violence as means rather than an end, the actualization of violence as a means can inadvertently become its own end, producing new violence, producing violence anew, reiterating the license, and licensing further violence. Violence does not exhaust itself in the realization of a just end; rather, it renews itself in directions that exceed both deliberate intention and instrumental schemes. In other words, by acting as if the use of violence can be a means to achieve a nonviolent end, one imagines that the practice of violence does not in the act posit violence as its own end. The technē is undermined by the praxis, and the use of violence only makes the world into a more violent place, by bringing more violence into the world.
 * Judith Butler,

 * Violence against the other is, in this sense, violence against oneself, something that becomes clear when we recognize that violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world.
 * Judith Butler,

 * The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics “violent”. [...] Hence, we should be wary about those who claim that violence is necessary to curb or check violence; those who praise the forces of law, including the police and the prisons, as the final arbiters. To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow.
 * Judith Butler,

C

 * We had relieved our own pain by inflicting it on others.
 * Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War, p. 305 (40th Anniversary Edition)

 * Dr. King’s policy was, if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.
 * Stokely Carmichael, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

 * There is another question which arises out of this. Can peace, goodwill, and confidence be built upon submission to wrong-doing backed by force? One may put this question in the largest form. Has any benefit or progress ever been achieved by the human race by submission to organised and calculated violence? As we look back over the long story of the nations we must see that, on the contrary, their glory has been founded upon the spirit of resistance to tyranny and injustice, especially when these evils seemed to be backed by heavier force. Since the dawn of the Christian era a certain way of life has slowly been shaping itself among the Western peoples, and certain standards of conduct and government have come to be esteemed. After many miseries and prolonged confusion, there arose into the broad light of day the conception of the right of the individual; his right to be consulted in the government of his country; his right to invoke the law even against the State itself. Independent Courts of Justice were created to affirm and inforce this hard-won custom. Thus was assured throughout the English-speaking world, and in France by the stern lessons of the Revolution, what Kipling called, “Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law.” Now in this resides all that makes existence precious to man, and all that confers honour and health upon the State.
 * Winston Churchill, Broadcast to the United States and to London, 16 October 1938

 * Much of the sanctimonious abhorrence displayed by the ruling class and its apologists against the use of violence in the class struggle is rooted in the desire to maintain the integrity of its class monopoly of violence.
 * Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948), p. 168

D

 * The Lord examines the righteous, but the wicked, those who love violence, he hates with a passion.
 * Psalms 11:5 NIV

 * For he will rescue the poor who cry for help, Also the lowly one and whoever has no helper. He will have pity on the lowly and the poor, And the lives of the poor he will save. From oppression and from violence he will rescue them, And their blood will be precious in his eyes.
 * Psalms 72:12-14; New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures.

 * Democracy don’t rule the world,/You’d better get that in your head,/This world is ruled by violence,/But I guess that’s better left unsaid./
 * Bob Dylan, Union Sundown 1983

E

 * "I wish your revolt well, my friend," said Bakhtin, "but beware that you don't end up merely repeating the same old story. The state abhors only one thing in the end, and that's the sound of laughter.  Violence it can understand."
 * Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars, Chapter 4 (1987).
 * Excerpted from a fictional conversation between Mikhail Bakhtin and James Connolly.

 * Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
 * Albert Einstein, "Mein Weltbild" (1931) [English: My World-view] translated as the title essay "The World As I See It" in The World As I See It (1949), New York: Philosophical Library, ISBN 0806527900.

F

 * Violence is man re-creating himself.
 * Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Chapter 1 (1961).

 * In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence.
 * Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 3

G

 * Victory won by violence is tantamount to defeat, for it is momentary.
 * Mahatma Gandhi, 'Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13,' May 3, 1919.

 * Hitler...Mussolini...and Stalin are able to show the immediate effectiveness of violence. But it will be as transitory as that of Chenghis' slaughters. But the effects of Buddha's nonviolence persist and are likely to grow with age.
 * Mahatma Gandhi, March 1937, quoted in Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase. Volume 2; Navajivan Publishing House, 1956 (p. 802).

 * If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them.
 * Jonah Goldberg, ( Starbucks "The Way I See It" #22])

 * It is the technique of the baboon to try to get its way by violence.
 * A. C. Grayling, Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), ISBN 0-19-517755-X, Chapter 28, "Liberty"

H

 * Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
 * Robert A. Heinlein, in Starship Troopers (1959).

J

 * It is not a question of the necessity of violence, but how to organize it to fit our unique situation, to tie it with flawless exactitude to our political activity, and to organize it immediately.
 * George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 51

 * We are quite obviously faced with a need to organize some small defenses to the more flagrant abuses of the system now. ... While we await the precise moment when all of capitalism's victims will indignantly rise to destroy the system, we are being devoured. ... Some of us are going to have to take our courage in hand and build a hard revolutionary cadre for selective retaliatory violence.
 * Jonathan P. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1971), pp. 11-12

 * Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
 * Derrick Jensen, Endgame. p. IX

 * People often say that violence accomplishes nothing, that it's ineffective. Violence is dreadfully effective. That's why those in power use it.
 * Derrick Jensen, quoted in The Pied Pipers of Pacifism: Lee Hall, Gary Francione, and the Betrayal of Animal Liberation by Steven Best and Jason Miller (2009). p. 12.

 * The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.
 * Dr. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, "Cowley" (1781).

K

 * The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
 * Martin Luther King Jr., "Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?" (1967).

M

 * There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil, since nothing is in its place.
 * Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1796), Ch. III

for peace: hand clasped in hand firmer than fist on a gun or club, hand raised in greeting stronger than hand raised for violence
 * hopes
 * Lisa Suhair Majaj Geographies of Light (2009)

 * Violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.
 * Errico Malatesta, "Anarchism, Authoritarian Socialism and Communism" in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) p. 59.

 * To place the responsibility of violence on the illiterate, poor and unemployed mobs is to completely miss the pathologies amongst us, the privileged and the powerful, which are the greatest enablers of violence.
 * Nissim Mannathukkaren on the 2020 Delhi riots, The Barbarity of False Equivalence, 8 March 2020, The Wire

 * Violence creates nothing but violence, no matter what we call it and what the excuse. And so it goes, down all the centuries.
 * Michael Moorcock, The Steel Tsar (1981), Book 2, Chapter 8

N

 * Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence.
 * Huey Newton, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America, doctoral dissertation submitted to the faculty of University of California Santa Cruz, June 1, 1980

P

 * The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? [...] To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it.
 * Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack, "The World Is Not Falling Apart", Slate, December 22, 2014

 * Without promoting fraternity, our democracy cannot survive. And the dangerous demonisation of minorities has to be countered, as it is this hate which gets transformed into intense violence.
 * Ram Puniyani, Combating Hate: Building Bridges of Love, 14 May 2020, NewsClick

R

 * Revolt, it will be said, implies violence; but this is an outmoded, an incompetent conception of revolt. The most effective form of revolt in this violent world we live in is non-violence.
 * Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics, 1954.

 * Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence. Recourse to violence then is an indication of weakness, not of strength, and the revolution with the greatest possibilities of a successful outcome will undoubtedly be the one in which there is no violence, or in which violence is reduced to a minimum, for such a revolution would indicate the near unanimity of the population in the objectives of the revolution. … Violence as a means breeds violence; the cult of personalities as a means breeds dictators--big and small--and servile masses; government--even with the collaboration of socialists and anarchists--breeds more government. Surely then, freedom as a means breeds more freedom, possibly even the Free Society! To Those who say this condemns one to political sterility and the Ivory Tower our reply is that 'realism' and their 'circumstantialism' invariably lead to disaster. We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary to resisting war than in participation in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal power to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion.
 * Vernon Richards, "Anarchism and violence" in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) pp. 50-51.

 * Violence stinks no matter which side of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan.
 * Tom Robbins, ''Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1976).

 * We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.
 * Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

 * I am not part of the human race. Humanity has rejected me. The females of the human species have never wanted to mate with me, so how could I possibly consider myself part of humanity? Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why. I am more than human. I am superior to them all. I am Elliot Rodger... Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent... Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god. Humanity is a disgusting, depraved, and evil species. It is my purpose to punish them all. I will purify the world of everything that is wrong with it. On the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved.
 * Elliot Rodger, My Twisted World (2014), p. 135

 * We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.
 * Walter Rodney, The Groundings with my Brothers (1969), p. 22

S

 * We are a fine species with some potential. Yet we are racked by sickening amounts of violence. Unless we are hermints, we feel the threat of it, often as a daily shadow. And regardless of where we hide, should our leaders push the button, we will all be lost in a final global violence.
 * Robert Sapolsky, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (New York: A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 157–158.

 * Violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume.
 * William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 6

 * The definition of “violence” has now expanded to include a new continuum of behaviors and feelings that are also generically used to ascribe a negative value to a person’s actions. The word “violence” has expanded far beyond the field of physical assault to also mean emotional abuse and, unfortunately, emotional conflict where there is no abuse. In recent years, we see “violence” and “abuse” being ascribed to, efforts to understand phenomena, and social and psychological analysis. “Abuse” is also regularly used to describe disagreement and misunderstanding. Accusations of “policing,” “shaming,” and other expressions of “call-out culture” demanding “safety” from uncomfortable ideas represent people and actions as laden with blame, refusing interactivity around the content of ideas and perceptions. This is in line with the similar practice of calling racial analysis “playing the race card.” Trying to understand and explain structures of pathology is repressed by accusations of wrong-doing. Thinking is wrong. Saying is wrong. Not only are revelations unwanted, they get mischaracterized as harm.
 * Sarah Schulman,

 * The word “violence” should be used to describe physical violence. Emotional cruelty, shunning, group bullying—these things can be worse than some violence, but they are not the same. If this wide range of precise experiences is all collapsed into the generic word “violence,” then nothing has any differentiation, therefore all the variations lose meaning. And as I have been arguing, rhetorical devices that hide details keep truth from being known and faced. Using the word “violence” without metaphor will help with the current discourse of overreaction and help us discern, with more awareness, the differences between Abuse and Conflict.
 * Sarah Schulman,

 * Physical violence has many varied manifestations, and non-defensive violence is never justified or desirable, nor does it solve problems. The most common scenario is the regularly violent spouse who initiates violence as a control mechanism, where it is used to enforce behaviors in the victim. Then there is the couple who both lack problem-solving skills and resort to violence irregularly, or in a single incident, in ways that are equally undesirable but don’t result in one person’s domination. They do not endanger each other physically, although there are clearly signs of problems that need to be faced and dealt with. These are obviously different phenomena. And I think they should be treated differently even though they both involve physical violence. Once we stop being determined to produce a victim and are instead focused on learning the truth of what actually happened, we become willing to accept the discomfort of recognizing two people as being Conflicted and embrace a more humane and acknowledging vision of social relationships. This is essential if we want peace.
 * Sarah Schulman,

 * You should not use violence.
 * Šuruppak, Instructions of Shuruppak (3rd millennium BCE).

T

 * Physical violence would be impossible without deep unconsciousness. It can also occur easily whenever and wherever a crowd of people or even an entire nation generates a negative collective energy field.
 * Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, p. 51, (2005)

 * Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it.
 * Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, p. 67, (2005)

 * For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
 * Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, p. 101, (2005)

 * All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
 * Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908).

 * As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence — as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.
 * Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu (1908), p. 20.

 * People in favour of the use of force all think that it is just a means of attaining justice and peace. But peace and justice are free from violence...That is the final objective of history. If you abandon non-violence, you have no sense of history. You pass history by, you put history on ice, you are a traitor to history.
 * André Trocmé, quoted in Petra Kelly, Fighting for Hope, Chatto and Windus, 1984.

W

 * All violence is justified by the perpetrators and their supporters, and condemned by those who disagree. In other words, all humans support violence when they agree with the philosophy of the perpetrators and condemn violence when they disagree with that philosophy.
 * Paul Watson, "ELF and ALF - Terrorism Is as Terrorism Does", taken from Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004), p. 283

 * Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
 * George F. Will, International Herald Tribune (7 May 1990).

 * I wouldn't use physical violence even if I could, because one of my romantic ideas is that physical violence is beneath the dignity of a man, and that whatever you get by physical aggression costs more than it is worth.
 * Nero Wolfe, in Rex Stout's novel Too Many Cooks (1938), chapter 10.

 * The trouble about the use of force or violence as the primary instrument of a Government or society is the inordinate difficulty of stopping or stabilizing it. It does not matter whether the units be individuals, classes, or nations, the more they rely upon force to determine their relations, the more difficult it becomes to stabilize relations.
 * Leonard Woolf, "Meditation on Abyssinia", The Political Quarterly, January 1936. Volume Seven, Issue One. Reprinted in In Savage Times: Leonard Woolf on Peace and War, Containing Four Pamphlets, Garland Publishing, 1973.

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

 * Violence is as American as cherry pie.
 * H. Rap Brown, press conference at the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee headquarters, Washington, D.C., July 27, 1967, as reported by The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., July 27, 1967, p. 1.

 * The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest.
 * William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, p. 78 (1970).

 * Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.
 * William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, p. 88–89 (1970).

 * I'd hate to be in those [slum] conditions and I'll tell you if I were in those conditions, you'd have more trouble than you have already because I've got enough spark left in me to lead a mighty good revolt.
 * Hubert Humphrey, speech to the National Association of Counties in New Orleans, Louisiana, July 18, 1966, as reported by The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, July 19, 1966, p. 18.

 * I feel that we will continue to have a non-violent movement, and we will continue to find the vast majority of Negroes committed to non-violence, at least as the best tactical approach and from a pragmatic point of view as the best strategy in dealing with the problem of racial injustice. Realism impels me to admit, however, that when there is justice and the pursuit of justice, violence appears, and where there is injustice and frustration, the potentialities for violence are greater, and I would like to strongly stress the point that the more we can achieve victories through non-violence, the more it will be possible to keep the non-violent discipline at the center of the movement. But the more we find individuals facing conditions of frustration, conditions of disappointment and seething despair as a result of the slow pace of things and the failure to change conditions, the more it will be possible for the apostles of violence to interfere.
 * Martin Luther King, Jr., televised interview, "Meet the Press", March 28, 1965.—Transcript, p. 9.

 * Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.
 * Thurgood Marshall, speech at the national convention of Alpha Phi Alpha, St. Louis, Missouri, August 15, 1966, as reported by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 17, 1966, p. 1.

 * Our most serious challenges to date have been external—the kind this strong and resourceful country could unite against. While serious external dangers remain, the graver threats today are internal: haphazard urbanization, racial discrimination, disfiguring of the environment, unprecedented interdependence, the dislocation of human identity and motivation created by an affluent society—all resulting in a rising tide of individual and group violence.
 * To Establish Justice, to Insure Domestic Tranquility, final report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1960), p. xxxii. Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower was chairman of the commission.

title: Violence


text:
Albus Dumbledore

Albus Dumbledore is the headmaster of Hogwarts in the popular book series Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling.

Quotes
Hogwarts Headmaster, Founder of the Order of the Phoenix, with a fondness for sherbet lemon and knitting patterns.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

 * "The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution."
 * "Ah, music! A magic beyond all we do here!"
 * "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that."
 * "After all, to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure."
 * "What happened down in the dungeons between you and Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally the whole school knows."
 * "The Stone was really not such a wonderful thing. As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all - the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them."
 * "Fear of a name increases fear of a thing itself."
 * "I believe your friends Misters Fred and George Weasley were responsible for trying to send you a toilet seat. No doubt they thought it would amuse you."

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)

 * "I will only have truly left the school when none here are loyal to me."
 * "It is not our abilities that show who we truly are, it is our choices."

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)

 * "You think the dead we love ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble."
 * "Fat lady, who did this to you?"
 * "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light."

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)

 * "I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.... At these times... I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure."
 * "If your determination to shut your eyes will carry you so far, Cornelius, then we have reached a parting of the ways. You must act as you see fit and I must act as I see fit."
 * "Curiosity is not a sin.... But we should exercise caution with our curiosity... yes, indeed."
 * "Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."
 * "You place too much importance... on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!"
 * "It is my belief... that the truth is generally preferable to lies."
 * "Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery."
 * "No spell can reawaken the dead, Harry. I trust you know that."
 * "Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open."
 * "Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right, and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good and kind and brave because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort."

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)

 * "Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young..."
 * "There is a room in the Department of Mysteries,... that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that resides there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could close your mind. It was your heart that saved you."
 * "By all means continue destroying my possessions, I daresay I have too many."

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)

 * "And now, Harry, let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure."
 * "He [Voldemort] never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole."
 * "I would assume that you were going to offer me refreshment, but the evidence so far suggests that that would be optimistic to the point of foolishness."
 * "...yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often."
 * "Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth."
 * "It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more."
 * "No, I was merely reading the Muggle magazines . . . I do love knitting patterns."
 * "I am not worried, Harry... I am with you."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)

 * “It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”
 * "Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love."
 * "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

About

 * It's good that children's literature includes the reality of gay people, since we exist in every society. But many are disappointed that she did not make Dumbledore's sexuality explicit in the Harry Potter book. Many also agree that Making it obvious would have sent a much more powerful message of understanding and acceptance.
 * Peter Tatchell, "JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay", BBC, 20 October 2007

title: Albus Dumbledore