Ben Dreyfuss famous quotes

American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#Art #Real #Identity

Blue jeans and Hollywood and rock & roll won the cold war.
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#War #Rocks #Blue

British films are all "room with a view and a staircase and a pond."
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#Views #Ponds #Rooms

Nationality was - and is - far less a divide than age... because "everything is global, man!"
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#Men #Age

We're a leader sure, but still a member of the global community. And that's true and important and when America acts like its worst self on the global stage is when we forget that.
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#America #Self #Community

Nietzsche said that everyone tells themselves the story of their life. That's true about countries, too. We're constantly telling ourselves the American story.
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#Country #Stories #Said

The story of America is necessarily one of progress because if it's not than it's a stale story where we have not risen above Klansmen.
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#America #Progress #Stories

Other people had strived for freedom and promise and ratatatata but the Constitution [of USA] was the first time we codified it aspirationally and wrote it down and put it up on a wall and said, "this is us." If your father was a cobbler, and his father was a cobbler, and his father was a cobbler, you don't have to be a cobbler.
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#Wall #Father #Usa

I love the bullshit morning shows. They're so stupid but I love them.
-- Ben Dreyfuss

#Morning #Stupid #Bullshit

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.

Art, however innocent, looks like deceiving.

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.

I don't really want to write fiction at all. I don't see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.

Together, these advocates create a pro-Israeli case so compelling that the idea and reality of Israel has worked itself deep into American culture, politics and foreign policy. Many American Jews refuse to accept it, but the real debate between Israel’s supporters and detractors in America is all but over.

Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.

The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.

A secure pluralistic society requires communities that are educated and confident both in the identity and depth of their own traditions and in those of their neighbours.