Robert Warshow famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Modern equalitarian societies whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier. Happiness thus becomes the chief political issue -- in a sense, the only political issue -- and for that reason it can never be treated as an issue at all.
-- Robert Warshow

#Equality #Issues #Political
In the deeper layers of the modern consciousnessevery attempt to succeed is an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless among enemies: one is punished for success. This is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous, is--ultimately--impossible.
-- Robert Warshow

#Success #Evil #Leaving
A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.
-- Robert Warshow

#Men #Honest #Enough
The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence. In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects Americanism itself.
-- Robert Warshow

#Art #Quality #Modern Life
Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.
-- Robert Warshow

#Culture #Principles #Function
The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.
-- Robert Warshow

#Attitude #Thinking #Intelligent

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.
I am fiscally prudent and socially progressive. I believe in protecting a woman's right to choose. I believe in marriage equality.
Through Hamas, Iran has been able to buy itself a seat on the table in talking about the Palestinian issue. And, as a result, through Hamas it does play a role in the issue of the Palestinians, as strange as that should sound.
[George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.
I have tried to talk about the issues in this campaign... and this has sometimes been a lonely road, because I never meet anybody coming the other way.
The Civic Culture (and The Civic Culture Revisited) remains the best study of comparative political culture in our time.
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
I have reaffirmed my political will to work towards national unity.
Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease.

Robert Warshow famous quotes

You may also like: