A Quote by William O. Douglas

I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views - towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues - has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform...not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view.
I like the idea of people having romantic tendencies towards a place they don't know that well. I think it's great. Why not? My dad's view of New York is very similar to Americans' when they talk about Ireland.
I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.
The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.
I'm trying to make a primitive painting. I'm trying to summon the archaic. I want to enter into a primitive situation. This is my protest against the sensory deprivation that we experience, which is due to this tendency towards globalization, towards homogenization, towards the generic - a technological standard rather than an aesthetic standard. I'm mining history, trying to regenerate a pictorial situation that is more humanistic. It's not about commodification, it's not about fitting into some sort of corporate structure. It's opposed to that direction.
When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.
Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.
Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.
I think that language matters. I think that people who are in public life have an opportunity to help the public understand issues and understand the urgency of issues. And to that extent, I think it is important how issues are talked about.
I think politics has an influence on my work now, perhaps more so than when I was a childless young man, but I hope never to deal with these kinds of issues in anything more than a covert manner. I'm more interested in figuring out what I think than in pronouncing my views to the world.
I live in New York now and most of magazines have turned more towards reality stars. So, really I think that's great because it's turned towards people who want it rather than... So, I think it's actually kind of imploding in on itself a little bit.
For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next...They are set up on the course of their existence, and the faster they climb towards its zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more.
Every great work of art has two faces, one towards its own time and one towards future, towards eternity.
Legislation has been and is still directed towards the protection of wealth, rather than towards the far more important interests of labor on which everything of value to mankind depends.
I have had issues with depression all my life, and it's probably true to say there was a tendency towards it even when I was very young, during my schooldays. There was often - and this is quite common with comics - a sense of not feeling as if I belonged anywhere.
I can take the spotlight that shines on me and shift it towards those issues that are infinitely more important than my own issues.
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
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