American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.
Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus.
An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator’s power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future.
By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.
Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery.
A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off each other.
Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined – even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness – to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.
We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.
The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature; the celebrity reveals the possibilities of the media.
The shadow has become the substance.
The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men’s use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war.
Much of what we have been doing to improve the world’s opinion of us has had the contrary effect. Audio-visual aids which we have sent over the world are primary aids to the belief in the irrelevance, the arrogance, the rigidity, and the conceit of America. Not because they are poorly made. On the contrary, because they are well made and vividly projected. Not because they are favorable images or unfavorable images, but because they are images.
This sense of time, the awareness that countless others have come before and that others will follow in endless generations, distinguishes man from other animals. With this discovery of the meaning of death – that man’s own life is limited – the life of architecture begins. And so begins man the creator’s effort to conquer time.
There is no cure for illusions. There is only the opportunity for discovery.
Yet, while tobacco and the newly dominant Southern crop, cotton, put Southern roots ever deeper into the soil, the fisheries drew New England out toward the world.
We try to make our celebrities stand in for the heroes we no longer have, or for those who have been pushed out of our view... Yet the celebrity is usually nothing greater than a more-publicized version of us. In imitating him, in trying to dress like him, talk like him, look like him, think like him, we are simply imitating ourselves.
The more readily we make household names and the more numerous they become, the less are they worthy of our admiration... We can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero. In a now-almost-forgotten sense, all heroes are self-made.