Possibility Quotes - page 12
In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
Theodor Adorno
Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity. And therefore it's necessary at first that society cares about the educational system, that equality of opportunity for self-realization is guaranteed.
Joseph Beuys
I had the feeling that another kind of life -- perhaps in a transcendental area -- would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma.
Joseph Beuys
I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France. This picture will be called 'The Blue Revolution'. It isn't the fact of my taking power in France that interests me, but rather the possibility of creating a monochrome picture in my new manner: ‘The Refinement of Sensibility'.
Yves Klein
It was in 1947 that the idea of a conscious monochrome vision came to me... Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see', to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me; absolute freedom! But each time I could neither imagine or think of the possibility of considering this as a painting, a picture, until the day when I said: Why not?
Yves Klein
Was it the culmination of a process of fatigue brought about by the proliferation of an easy tachism in the world? A reaction to escape anarchic informalism? An attempt to flee abstract excess and the urge for something more concrete? Did I see the possibility to reach even more primordial levels, the most extremely pure elements, the most essential elements of painting that the masters from the preceding generation had stimulated me to seek?
Antoni Tàpies
I ought to respect myself for my friends' sake, and my children's. It is time, at fifty-six, to begin, at least, to know oneself, - and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to believe in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my "light" - my "dews" - my "breezes" - my bloom and freshness, - no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.
John Constable
In Britain and indeed the entire West, today, we are part way through a process – artificially imposed by a dogmatic liberal ruling class - that is steadily destroying the very possibility of preserving our racial and cultural differences, and the unique nations to which they have given rise.
Nicholas John Griffin
My current situation is, I always want to find a new possibility. China is in a changing stage, and that puts me in a very difficult situation, because anytime a new condition is announced there is a lot of struggle between the new and the old. So the establishment really becomes extremely nervous because they are refusing to meet very basic human rights or values. I don't know how long I can still struggle in China, but I will try my best. Because this is a land I am very familiar with, and we have been in the same kind of struggle for generations. I think it's a time for change.
Ai Weiwei
Nothing can silence me as long as I am alive. I don't give any kind of excuse. If I cannot come out [of China] or I cannot go in [to China] this is not going to change my belief. But when I am there, I am in this condition: I see it, I see people who need help. Then you know, I just want to offer my possibility to help them.
Ai Weiwei
...the finances of the country is intimately associated with the liberties of the country. It is a powerful leverage by which English liberty has been gradually acquired. Running back into the depths of antiquities for many centuries, it lies at the root of English liberty, and if the House of Commons can by any possibility lose the power of the control of the grants of public money, depend upon it your very liberty will be worth very little in comparison.
William Ewart Gladstone
Science fiction writers thought it would be possible. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other authors found ways to get people to the moon. But none of those writers foresaw any possibility of the lunar explorers being able to communicate with Earth, transmit data, position information, or transmit moving pictures of what they saw back to Earth. The authors foresaw my part of the adventure, but your part was beyond their comprehension.
Neil Armstrong
Learning to play the guitar is a combination of mental and motor skill acquisition. And to develop motor skills, repetition is essensial...Whenever musicians have trouble executing a passage, they generally tend to blame themselves for not having enought talent. Actually, all that's wrong is they don't know where their fingers are supposed to go...You should learn the piece in your head before you play it. And when you do play it, play it so slow that therre's no possibility of making a mistake.
Howard Roberts
I am always afraid of explaining what I am doing, because my mind works so perversely. If I know why I am doing something it immediately goes to another channel and I try not to do that anymore. So in any interview there is a possibility that I have to leave the interview and change my entire life. I think I'll stop now and let the works answer the questions. To much information is an obstacle to seeing. My works are created to be seen.
Robert Rauschenberg
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Robert Rauschenberg
Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead of using machines to liberate men from the burden of mechanical and repetitive work. it subordinates all social activities to the imperatives of an incessant drive for individual enrichment in terms of money, instead of gearing social life to the development of rich individualities and their social relations. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, inherent in every commodity, fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery. When capitalism is not overthrown once it has created the material and social preconditions for a classless society of associated producers, this contradiction implies the possibility of a steadily increasing transformation of the forces of production into forces of destruction, in the most literal sense of the word: not only forces of destruction of wealth (crises and wars), of human wealth and human happiness, but also forces of destruction of life tout court.
Ernest Mandel
