“...artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake...”
Picasso
Message to American Artists’ Congress, 1937

“The ideological struggle must be waged nationally in the whole field of culture.”
John Howard Lawson
Hollywood 10 before House of Un-American Activities 1947. In 1946 another of the Hollywood 10, Albert Maltz, attacked the Communist Party’s dogma that art should be a weapon in the class conflict.

“When Jack (Warner of Warner Brothers) told director John Huston that he’d told the committee a “few names”, Huston shook his head. Jack said, “I guess I shouldn’t have, should I?... I guess I’m a squealer”. At a second hearing Jack told the committee he had been carried away naming names. “I have never seen a Communist and wouldn’t know one if I saw one...”
Hollywood By Thy Name
The Warner Brothers Story
by Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Millner

“Actually, I think that the United States has been in a kind of pre-fascist mood for years.”
Noam Chomsky
Understanding Power, 2002
statement from the ‘90s

“The violence which all electric media inflict on their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous system... the less identity the more violence.”
Marshall McCluhan

“That a dunce like Harris Rosenblatt (character in Good as Gold) should find adherents in Washington raised questions about the sanctity and durability of government and American society that no amount of patriotic reasoning could subdue.”
Joseph Heller
Good as Gold, 1976

“What is beyond doubt is that the decision in favour of co-operation (with the U.S.) doomed the British (Secret) Services, in the long run, to a junior status. That junior status has been a sobering fact for many years.”
Kim Philby
My Silent War, 1968

“Power especially proves itself to itself by the singular abuse of itself which consists of crowning some absurdity with the laurels of success, thereby insulting genius, the only strength which power can never attain. The promotion of Caligula’s horse, that imperial farce, has enjoyed an almost unbroken run.”
Balzac
A Harlot High and Low, 1839-47

“As the music business becomes more corporate, the case can be made that consumers, musicians and ultimately, culture are damaged. Music as art is certainly a victim. While critics tend to dismiss the changes in the industry over the last 10 years as no different than the ‘50s,’60s and ‘70s, when a flood of imitations greeted every pop success, the relentless mainstreaming of every niche market in the last decade has invariably taken the avant garde and reduced it to its lowest common denominator.”
Bruce Haring
Off the Charts, 1993
L.A. pop music critic

Capt. Segura... “He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.” - “I didn’t know there were class distinctions.”
Graham Greene
Our Man in Havana, 1958

“Since Rousseau and Kant, there have been two schools of Liberalism, which may be distinguished as the hard-headed and the soft-hearted. The hard-headed developed, through Bentham, Ricardo and Marx, by logical stages into Stalin ; the soft-hearted, by other logical stages, through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle and Nietzsche, into Hitler... too schematic to be quite true, but it may serve as a map.”
Bertrand Russell, 1946

“If there’s no progress in small matters, there’s no point in seeking it in the really important ones.”
Anton Checkhov
Comments on the Russian theatre late 1900’s

Extract from a questionnaire to students:
“Have technical drawings ever affected you in any way (architectural or engineering plans, designs, tracing copies) and if so, how?
Have you noticed the effect of a colour once it has been transferred to an object (which?) or when you see it in isolation?”
Kandinsky
Artist from the Russian Revolution (short-lived) re-thinking of art education, Moscow, 1920

“My conviction is... that science will continue to move ever closer to the moment of creation, facilitated by the ever-greater simplicity we find there... (perhaps) reducible to point-like objects with certain intrinsic properties.”
George Smoot + Keay Davidson
Wrinkles in Time, 1993