Milton Mayer famous quotes

The art of dying graciously is nowhere advertised, in spite of the fact that its market potential is great.
-- Milton Mayer

#Death #Art #Dying

Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution of the Jewish problem,' which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.
-- Milton Mayer

#War #Winning #Government

The marvels - of film, radio, and television - are marvels of one-way communication, which is not communication at all.
-- Milton Mayer

#Communication #Radio #Way

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
-- Milton Mayer

#Real #Patriotic #Government

The American goes to Paris, always has, and comes back and tells his neighbor, always does, how exorbitant and inhospitable it is, how rapacious and selfish and unaccommodating and unresponsive it is, how dirty and noisy it is-and the next summer his neighbor goes to Paris.
-- Milton Mayer

#Summer #Selfish #Dirty

Scott Buchanan . . . taught me that the questions that can be answered are not worth asking.
-- Milton Mayer

#Asking #Taught

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Cursed is the man who dies, but the evil done by him survives.

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.

Call no man happy till he is dead.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Art, however innocent, looks like deceiving.

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?