Goldwin Smith Quotes

People have been convinced that growth for growth's sake is a good thing.

Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new, we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable each year.

The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul-less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bankrupts families and townships. It disables whole classes of decent, normal citizens. It ruins the air we breathe. It corrupts and deadens our spirit.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money.

We judge of entire nations by the productions of a few mechanical arts, and think we are talking of men, while we are boasting of their estates, their dress, and their palaces. The sense in which we apply the terms, great, and noble, high rank, and high life, show, that we have, on such occasions, transferred the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage; and that excellence itself is, in our esteem, a mere pageant, adorned at a great expense, by the labors of many workmen.

I've done my part to 'ruin' Austin.

L.A., for me, is a perfect microcosm of America - because it's so profligate, and so glamorous, and so anti-intellectual, finally.

I think Los Angeles certainly grew out and grew up, but I don't think it matured. It lost the appeal and the hunger and the beauty of its adolescence and went straight to a middle-aged ugly, overfed monster seeking mindless pleasure and being obsessively acquisitive. It's so materialistic. It grew up, but it didn't mature.

Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.

The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine istheir uglinesstheir pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin,... the world as an Americanized vacuumtheir fake health, their fake youthfulnessthe way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.

The overpopulation of the earth The destruction of our natural habitat The rat race of humanity against itself The disappearance of all strong emotions and passions through pampering Genetic deterioration through deficient selection pressure on development and the lack of preservation of the norms of social behavior The breakdown of tradition; and The increasing susceptibility of humans to indoctrination

Malthusian famine scenarios have systematically distracted attention from the fact that it is not people’s reproductive habits that are the principal source of most of the misuse or waste of the world’s resources, but the contradictions and motives of capitalist development.

All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed — selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful — we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals?

My family went to the Hamptons, so I understand what happens when a slice of perfect utopia gets overdeveloped, when one way of living is replaced by another.

Of course L.A. has its mad bits: you can get a collagen cappuccino if that's what you really want. But the American Dream is so ingrained in the American culture, and the place you go to find it is L.A.

I hate to say it - it breaks my heart - but we're a tacky, money-obsessed culture.

New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.

In the 70s Sweden was innocent, but we've lost that. Society has become less idealistic and everything is about how much money you have in your wallet.

It's one of the central problems of American culture: telling you if you're younger, more beautiful, more famous, whatever, that then you'll be happy.

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.