If Man Is Not Ready To Risk

In The Course Of History, All Empires Have Been Created With Premeditation, By An Effort Often Sustained Over Several Generations. Every Power Has Been Roman To A Degree. The United States Is The First Nation To Become The Most Powerful In The World Without Having Sought To Be So. Its Exceptional Energy And Organization Have Never Been Oriented Toward Conquest.

Our Art Culture Makes No Attempt To Search The Past For Precedents, But Transforms The Entire Past Into A Sequence Of Provisional Responses To A Problem That Remains Intact.

Nothing Is Harder Than To Get People To Think About What They Are Going To Do.

The Mind Supplies The Idea Of A Nation, But What Gives This Idea Its Sentimental Force Is A Community Of Dreams.

Our Characteristic Response To The Mutilated Statue, The Bronze Dug Up From The Earth, Is Revealing. It Is Not That We Prefer Time-worn Bas-reliefs, Or Rusted Statuettes As Such, Nor Is It The Vestiges Of Death That Grip Us In Them, But Those Of Life. Mutilation Is The Scar Left By The Struggle With Time, And A Reminder Of It - Time Which Is As Much A Part Of Ancient Works Of Art As The Material They Are Made Of, And Thrusts Up Through The Fissures, From A Dark Underworld, Where All Is At Once Chaos And Determinism.