In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.
The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.
The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.
The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. . . Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.
Then we have the silence of the eyes which will always help us to see God. Our eyes are like two windows through which Christ or the world comes to our hearts. Often we need great courage to keep them closed. How often we say, I wish I had not seen this thing, and yet we take so little trouble to overcome the desire to see everything.
United with the angels and saints of the heavenly Church, let us adore the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Prostrate, we adore this great mystery that contains God's new and definitive covenant with humankind in Christ.
I have always felt that the surest way to qualify for the job just ahead is to work a little harder than any one else on the job one is holding down.
Care not what they say about the color of your skin let the brilliant light of your soul blind them.