Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.
George SteinerThe journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
George SteinerBookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.
George SteinerThere would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any โsocial contractโ or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.
George Steiner