Quotes About Impotence

We may say that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and to amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase.

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent

The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Self-surrender is essential, and by that is meant the confession of personal impotence.

The intelligent leftist admits that his generation will not construct the perfect society, but trusts in a future generation. His intelligence discovers his personal impotence, but his leftism prevents him from discovering man's impotence.

To maintain that "all ideas are respectable" is nothing but pompous nonsense. Nevertheless, there is no opinion that the support of a sufficient number of imbeciles does not oblige one to put up with. Let us not disguise our impotence as tolerance.

In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purpose has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations. . . This is only one of the many places where human impotence has shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly.

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

But in the unconscious the repressed dreams of omnipotent indulgence in pleasure persist, as the nucleus of man's universal neurosis and his restless discontent, the cor irrequietum of St. Augustine. The infantile conflict between actual impotence and dreams of omnipotence is also the basic theme of the universal history of mankind. And in both conflicts—in the history of the individual and the history of the race—the stakes are the meaning of love.

That's what I dislike most of all in people – cold irony. It's a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can't experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others

impotence. At the same time the ironists always have a world outlook that they proclaim triumphantly, though if one starts badgering and questioning them about the details, it turns out to consist of nothing but trivia and banalities.

And that inverted bowl we call The Sky, where under crawling coop't we live and die, lift not thy hands to It for help -- for it rolls impotently on as thou or I.

I have never derived the least joy out of amusements. Perhaps that is a sign of the impotence of pleasure. I ran riot and threw myself into wild diversions out of the simple desire to escape from my own shadow.