#distinction

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. ↗

— James Baldwin

#alone #artist #avoid #being #being alone

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#art form #aversion #between #conventional #criticism

They say that our sovereign is above his laws to his pleasure, and he may make it and break it as he pleases, without any distinction. The contrary is true, or else he should not have sworn to keep it. ↗

— Jack Cade

#any #break #contrary #distinction #else

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism

There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so. ↗

— Lucian Freud

#being #between #distinction #does #element

That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics. ↗

— Gordon Gould

#attitude #basic #between #columbia #days

I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer. ↗

— Ben Hecht

#belongs #better #connected #director #discovered

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience. ↗

— Audrey Hepburn

#career #distinction #each #experience #hold

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city. ↗

— Nathaniel Parker Willis

#city #distinction #present #ten #thousand

The Almighty has fixed the distinction of the races; the Almighty has made the black man inferior, and sir, by no legislation, by no partisan success, by no revolution, by no military power, can you wipe out this distinction. ↗

— Fernando Wood

#black #distinction #fixed #inferior #legislation