Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Stephen Prothero

Quote by Stephen Prothero

Work

God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Stephen Prothero
Stephen Prothero

Stephen Prothero is an American scholar specializing in the study of religion. Born on November 13, 1960, he is known for his research on the history of religion and the role of religion in American society. more

You May Also Like

“So many problems we will get to the bottom of later, but whose spatial aspect we must grasp right away. If the space of the industrial economy dominates the social space in which the Parisian worker or intellectual develops, to what extent could residential space, cultural space, or political space be planned without it being necessary to first intervene in economic structures?...In short...: to what extent can we freely build the framework for a social life in which we might be guided by our aspirations and not by our instincts?”

CitySituationist73Social Space
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image

“...Robert Louis Stevenson presents a character who, in London at night, is astonished 'to walk for such a long time in such a complex decor without encountering even the slightest shadow of an adventure.' The urbanists of the twentieth century will have to construct adventures. The simplest Situationist act would consist in abolishing all the memories of the employment of time of our epoch. It is an epoch that, up until now, has lived far below its means.”

WalkingSituationist103
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image

“...the assessment of psychological drift, that is the way in which an undirected pedestrian tends to move about in a particular quarter of the town, tending to establish natural connections between places, the zones of influence of particular institutions and public services, and so forth. It may well be objected that these techniques are un-scientific, disorderly and too subjective, but the fact remains that the Situationists are studying the actual texture of towns and their relationship to human beings more intensively than most architects and in a more down-to-pavement manner than most town planners.”

WalkingCitySituationistPedestrian140
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image

“8. Conditions of Dialogue The functional is what is practical. The only practical thing is the resolution of our fundamental problem: the realization of ourselves (our uncoupling from the system of isolation). This is useful and utilitarian. Nothing else. All the rest represents only trivial derivations of the practical, and its mystification.”

CitySituationist149
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image

“The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of objects of consumption, which will only have consumable value illusory to the extent to which they will first of all have been objects of spectacle' -- to the extent, that is, they have first appeared on the television screen, which henceforth had to be seen as an urbanistic tool in its own right.”

CitySituationist150
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image

“We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a new topography will be in fact the first realization of 'human geography.' On them we will replace oil-deposits with the contours of layers of untapped pedestrian consciousness.”

WalkingCitySituationistPedestrian165
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image

“4. Radicalism of forms. If a new model once created meets with much success on account of its greater efficiency than its predecessor, it lends certain neighbouring forms a formal radicalism, which attempts to borrow from the appearance of the new form: for example, bronze tools that had reached the furthest development of their utility had a disastrous influence on stone tools, warping them toward an elegance that could only be attained in bronze. Today aviation has imposed its aerodynamic forms even on baby strollers and irons. This radicalism of forms is a result of the fact that people become bored when they do not find some unexpected element in the familiar. This radicalism might seem illogical, as the advocates of standardization believe, but we must not forget that discovery is only made possible by this need of humanity.”

FormDesignSituationist56
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image

“At the very opposite of these eccentricities, the chiefly urban character of derive, in touch with those centres of possibilities and meanings that are the metropolises transformed by industry, would correspond to Marx's sentence: 'Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”

Situationist80Derive
Book:The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Create image