{"quotes":[{"text":"This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.","author":"Guy Debord","tags":["alienation","reification","spectacle","technology"],"id":22367,"author_id":"Guy+Debord"},{"text":"The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.","author":"Jawaharlal Nehru","tags":["atheism","bigotry","blind-belief","condemn","dogma","horror","india","organized-religion","spectacle","superstition"],"id":42079,"author_id":"Jawaharlal+Nehru"},{"text":"It is not for nothing that an ominous feeling often attaches itself to a procession. In films and stories we see spectacles forming in the street and parades coming from around the corner, and we know to greet then with distrust and apprehension: their intent is still to be revealed.","author":"Eudora Welty","tags":["apprehension","distrust","film","intent","parade","procession","spectacle","stories","street"],"id":43681,"author_id":"Eudora+Welty"},{"text":"The Marquis de V... - whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested - was saying to me with a wicked smile: 'Then again, the master gymnast might break his neck at any moment. What he is doing now is very dangerous, my dear, and the pleasure you take in his performance is the little frisson that danger affords you. Wouldn't it be thrilling, if his sweaty hand failed to grip the bar? The velocity acquired by his rotation about the bar would break his spine quite cleanly, and perhaps a little of the cervical matter might spurt out as far as this! It would be most sensational, and you would have a rare emotion to add to the field of your experience - for you collect emotions, don't you? What a pretty stew of terrors that man in tights stirs up in us!'Admit that you almost wish that he will fall! Me too. Many others in the auditorium are in the same state of attention and anguish. That is the horrible instinct of a crowd confronted with a spectacle which awakens in it the ideas of lust and death. Those two agreeable companions always travel together! Take it from me that at the very same moment - see, the man is now holding on to the bar by his fingertips alone - at the very same moment, a good number of the women in these boxes are ardently lusting after that man, not so much for his beauty as for the danger he courts.'The voice subtly changed its tone, suddenly becoming more interested. 'You have singularly pale eyes this evening, my dear Freneuse. You ought to give up bromides and take valerian instead. You have a charming and curious soul, but you must take command of its changes. You are too ardently and too obviously covetous, this evening, of the death - or at least the fall - of that man.'I did not reply. The Marquis de V... Was quite right. The madness of murder had taken hold of me again; the spectacle had me in its hallucinatory grip. Straitened by a penetrating and delirious anguish, I yearned for that man to fall.There are appalling depths of cruelty within me.","author":"Jean Lorrain","tags":["accident","acrobat","death","decadence","decadent","decadents","lust","spectacle"],"id":112912,"author_id":"Jean+Lorrain"},{"text":"The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.","author":"Mark O'Connell","tags":["announcers","darpa","irony","mass-entertainment","military","national-defense","spectacle","sports"],"id":136093,"author_id":"Mark+O%27Connell"},{"text":"Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity.","author":"Guy Debord","tags":["capitalism","consumer-society","spectacle"],"id":220023,"author_id":"Guy+Debord"},{"text":"Controversy is a last resort for the talentless.","author":"Criss Jami","tags":["art","artist","controversy","desperate","desperation","envy","fame","famous","gift","grandstanding","hater","haters","infamous","jealousy","last-resort","music","musician","noticed","offensive","painter","painting","peace","rebellion","skill","spectacle","talent","tranquility"],"id":233140,"author_id":"Criss+Jami"},{"text":"When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into rivers of the blood of cannon-blasted bodies.","author":"Comte de Lautréamont","tags":["blood","fame","gore","graceful","spectacle"],"id":269920,"author_id":"Comte+de+Lautr%C3%A9amont"},{"text":"My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.","author":"Ralph Waldo Emerson","tags":["life","living","observation","spectacle"],"id":293778,"author_id":"Ralph+Waldo+Emerson"},{"text":"Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.","author":"Ruth Ozeki","tags":["burn-out","media","spectacle"],"id":323310,"author_id":"Ruth+Ozeki"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}