I had been friendly with people who were in the Communist party and all the rest of the Left forces, which were oriented in the direction of mass action.
I expect the audience to come up to my level. I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.
My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.
We find the general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day by the mass of people acting in harmony as if by instinct. If they were instinctively violent, the world would end in no time.
Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through.
We do not have weapons of mass destruction.
The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all. ) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.
If you have no past or no future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait.
If the masses feel some anger, we must let them express it.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive.
Don't create for the masses. Create for the people who are your kind of weird.
If we want to work out a policy for the present, we must examine the past and prepare for the future, discard the material and elevate the spirit, rely on the individual and exclude the mass.
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess.
First, the probable cause of AIDS has been found: a variant of a known human cancer virus. Second, not only has the agent been identified, but a new process has been developed to mass produce this virus. Thirdly, with the discovery of both the virus and this new process, we now have a blood test for AIDS. With a blood test, we can identify AIDS victims with essentially 100% certainty.
When you focus on delighting an audience you care about, you strip the masses of their power.
The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses. The result is a tendency towards a continuous improvement in the average standard of living, a progressing enrichment of the many.
You are far more likely to do your best work if you are willing to delight a few as opposed to soothe the masses.
Observe the masses and do the opposite
