Morris Berman Quotes

#1. Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are "soft" and hold emptiness.

Robert Bly

#2. Love is the social equivalent of gravity.

Morris Berman

#3. If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?

Friedrich Nietzsche

#4. And I'll do what I damned well please.

Pam McCutcheon

#5. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

Ernest Hemingway,

#6. In 1997, the government spent $37 billion on military research and development, nearly two-thirds of what the entire world spent on the same. In

Morris Berman

#7. A heart full of love and compassion is the main source of inner strength, willpower, happiness, and mental tranquility

Dalai Lama

#8. Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence and beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls.

J.D. Salinger

#9. [I]nfinity is not part of the real world.

Morris Berman

#10. I believe in giving as honest an answer as I can. Because perhaps if people spent more time being honest with each other, especially with children, there would be less unhappiness in the world.

Jane Lotter

#11. Yes, she's bleeding to death upstairs, but I thought I'd avoid telling you right away, because I like to draw the suspense out.

Cassandra Clare

#12. We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.

Morris Berman

#13. The result is that children now live in an "ethos of fantasy consumerism." Modern American childhood, says Cross,

Morris Berman

#14. The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as "a collective effort to live a private life." In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction - the tragedy of American domestic

Morris Berman

#15. An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you

Morris Berman

#16. The real goal of a spiritual tradition should not be ascent, but openness, vulnerability, and this does not require great experiences but, on the contrary, very ordinary ones. Charisma is easy; presence, self-remembering, is terribly difficult, and where the real work lies.

Morris Berman

#17. By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.

Confucius

#18. It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.

Marcel Duchamp

#19. A world remade in the image of Walt Disney, and driven by an increasingly sophisticated communications technology, is the total breakdown of civilization.20

Morris Berman

#20. My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.

Anton Corbijn

#21. Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#22. The nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life.

Morris Berman

#23. The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains without substance, a realm from which the crucial dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.42 Who, then, can criticize this situation?

Morris Berman