Ugliness Quotes - page 4
More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
John W. Gardner
Moderate religious people may of course express distaste for such violence, pretending that the clear calls for grotesque and violent behaviour in their sacred book aren't there and cherry-picking the 'nice bits', but they are still guilty of not opening up the subject of belief to rational discourse, and in doing so are part of the machinery that leads to all the ugliness caused by fundamentalism.
Derren Brown
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
Kurt Vonnegut
I think of myself as an American artist: I like it here... I feel I represent the U. S. in my art but I'm not a social critic. I just paint those things in my paintings because those things are the things I know best. I'm not trying to criticize the U. S. in any way, not trying to show up any ugliness at all. I'm just a pure artist, I guess. But I can't say if I take myself seriously as an artist. I just hadn't thought about it. I don't know how they consider me in print, though.
Andy Warhol
If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology, which qua science relies on a psychic "inside we are all alike,” just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. [...] The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.
Hannah Arendt
He had learned that there were other ways of life from the ways of his great home. He had completed an experience. He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor. But with the beauty and the ugliness, the ice and the fire of it on his tongue and in his blood he could begin again.
Mervyn Peake
And that's what we celebrate today. The long arc of progress. Progress that is never assured, never guaranteed, but always possible, always there to be earned -– no matter how stuck we might seem sometimes. No matter how divided or despairing we may appear. No matter what ugliness may bubble up. Progress, so long as we're willing to push for it; so long as we're willing to reach for each other.
Barack Obama
The works of the great writers of the past are very beautiful even from without. And yet their visible beauty is sheer ugliness, compared with the beauty of those hidden treasures which disclose themselves only after very long, never easy, but always pleasant work. This always difficult but always pleasant work is, I believe, what the philosophers had in mind when they recommended education. Education, they felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.
Leo Strauss
The Reality? Is it then so certain that Life is made of four Absurdities?
Is it not far more certain that life is made up of Four Beauties
of Calmness, Joy, Harmony, Rhythm...
The truest reality.
And what of the expression of all this - Art?
Must Pandemonium and Ugliness ever stand for Strength?
Edward Gordon Craig
Sabina's initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear - in other words, Communist kitsch.
Milan Kundera