Herbert Quotes

We do not need to burn down the house to kill the rats

No great question will ever be settled in dollars and cents. Great questions must be settled on moral grounds and the tests of what makes free men.

[Professional engineers] must for years abandon their white collars except for Sunday.

The ancient bitter opposition to improved methods [of production] on the ancient theory that it more than temporarily deprives men of employment... has no place in the gospel of American progress.

Bless the children, for the national debt is theirs.

The job is nothing but a twenty-ring circus-with a whole lot of bad actors.

American business needs a lifting purpose greater than the struggle of materialism.

Truly every generation discovers the world all new again and knows it can improve it.

There is no more cruel illusion than that war makes a people richer.

The greatness of America has grown out of a political and social system and a method of control of economic forces distinctly its own - our American system.

The sense of community is indispensable...to full self-realization.

What does this mean 'mailer daemon'? Satan, are you messing with the e-mail system already?

One of Boomer's strong points is that he has a great background in just about everything.

The only secret knowledge we have is know-how and you can't break up know-how by court order.

Spurts don't count. The final score makes no mention of a splendid start if the finish proves that you were an also ran.

You know, I always do my best, no matter the quality of the film.

While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.

That which is cannot be true.

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.

Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.

The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason

This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.

Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.

The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.

If you love a person, you can forgive anything.

Fashion is just a name for one of the things that happen where mind and body intersect.

The old law permitted abortion to save one life when two would otherwise die. The new law permits abortion to take one life when two would otherwise live.

The most important educational need of the child is to feel himself worthy of love and a worthy dispenser of love. If infants learn what love is, they can go through life with sanity and happiness.

It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event.

Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.

Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.

The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.

Knowledge, to become Wisdom, needs Judgment.

Science is the key which unlocks the storehouses of nature.

The answer to our prayer may be the echo of our resolve.

The house of Lords must be the only institution in the world which is kept efficient by the persistent absenteeism of most of its members.