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Thus it was that America sank further and further into Americanism. Vast wealth and industry, and also brilliant invention, were concentrated upon pu… - Olaf Stapledon
" "Thus it was that America sank further and further into Americanism. Vast wealth and industry, and also brilliant invention, were concentrated upon puerile ends. In particular the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manners.
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About Olaf Stapledon
William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction. His best known, and what he considered as his best work, was Star Maker (1937), which included the first known description of a Dyson sphere. The Dyson sphere was later described by Freeman Dyson in the 1959 article "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation" in Science, as one possible method of locating extraterrestrial intelligence.
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William Olaf Stapledon
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Stapledon
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Additional quotes by Olaf Stapledon
The aim was to provide that in boring occupations hours should be short, and in interesting work long. Exceptionally, some monotonous work involved rather long hours, but in such cases the workers were chosen from the psychological class who thrive best on monotonous occupations in which they can day-dream.
Grotesque sentiments such as the lust of business success or economic power of any kind, and indeed every purely self-regarding passion, from that of the social climber to that of the salvation-seeking ascetic, are experienced by the explorer with something of that shame which the child, emerging into adolescence, may feel toward the still-clinging fascination of his outgrown toys, or with such disgust as the youth may feel when he wakes from some unworthy sexual infatuation
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Religion finally severed the unity which all willed but none could trust. An heroic nation of monotheists sought to impose its faith on a vaguely pantheist world. For the first and last time the Second Men stumbled into a world-wide civil war; and just because the war was religious it developed a brutality hitherto unknown.
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