A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.

War is a specific product of civilization.

The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.

He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.

By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.