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“Controversy is a last resort for the talentless.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru

“When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into rivers of the blood of cannon-blasted bodies.”
― Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems

“It seemed to Jahan that, in truth, this world, too, was a spectacle. One way or another, everyone was parading. They performed their tricks, each of them, some staying longer, others shorter, but in the end they all left through the back door, similarly unfulfilled, similarly in need of applause.”
― Elif Shafak, The Architect's Apprentice

“Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“When you don’t need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That’s the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Refrigerator Monologues

“Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the balloon was near. ... Means were used, I am told, to prevent the great balloon's rising so high as might endanger its bursting. Several bags of sand were taken on board before the cord that held it down was cut, and the whole weight being then too much to be lifted, such a quantity was discharged as would permit its rising slowly. Thus it would sooner arrive at that region where it would be in equilibrio with the surrounding air, and by discharging more sand afterwards, it might go higher if desired. Between one and two o'clock, all eyes were gratified with seeing it rise majestically from above the trees, and ascend gradually above the buildings, a most beautiful spectacle. When it was about two hundred feet high, the brave adventurers held out and waved a little white pennant, on both sides of their car, to salute the spectators, who returned loud claps of applause. The wind was very little, so that the object though moving to the northward, continued long in view; and it was a great while before the admiring people began to disperse. The persons embarked were Mr. Charles, professor of experimental philosophy, and a zealous promoter of that science; and one of the Messrs Robert, the very ingenious constructors of the machine.

{While U.S. ambassador to France, writing about witnessing, from his carriage outside the garden of Tuileries, Paris, the first manned balloon ascent using hydrogen gas by Jacques Charles on the afternoon of 1 Dec 1783. A few days earlier, he had watched the first manned ascent in Montgolfier's hot-air balloon, on 21 Nov 1783.}”
― Benjamin Franklin, Writings: The Autobiography / Poor Richard’s Almanack / Bagatelles, Pamphlets, Essays & Letters

“She was living in a time when historically it was permissible to smile like that above the face of someone who had died a violent death.”
― Ali Smith, The Accidental

“The Marquis de V... - whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested - was saying to me with a wicked smile: 'Then again, the master gymnast might break his neck at any moment. What he is doing now is very dangerous, my dear, and the pleasure you take in his performance is the little frisson that danger affords you. Wouldn't it be thrilling, if his sweaty hand failed to grip the bar? The velocity acquired by his rotation about the bar would break his spine quite cleanly, and perhaps a little of the cervical matter might spurt out as far as this! It would be most sensational, and you would have a rare emotion to add to the field of your experience - for you collect emotions, don't you? What a pretty stew of terrors that man in tights stirs up in us!

'Admit that you almost wish that he will fall! Me too. Many others in the auditorium are in the same state of attention and anguish. That is the horrible instinct of a crowd confronted with a spectacle which awakens in it the ideas of lust and death. Those two agreeable companions always travel together! Take it from me that at the very same moment - see, the man is now holding on to the bar by his fingertips alone - at the very same moment, a good number of the women in these boxes are ardently lusting after that man, not so much for his beauty as for the danger he courts.'

The voice subtly changed its tone, suddenly becoming more interested. 'You have singularly pale eyes this evening, my dear Freneuse. You ought to give up bromides and take valerian instead. You have a charming and curious soul, but you must take command of its changes. You are too ardently and too obviously covetous, this evening, of the death - or at least the fall - of that man.'

I did not reply. The Marquis de V... was quite right. The madness of murder had taken hold of me again; the spectacle had me in its hallucinatory grip. Straitened by a penetrating and delirious anguish, I yearned for that man to fall.

There are appalling depths of cruelty within me.”
― Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Phocas

“Spectacular sporting events are bread & circuses. The Superbowl, for instance, is anything but “super��. It is a Petri dish under the lens of mediaocrity, where surveillance of the spectators is just as mind numbing as the incomprehensible homo-erotic beefcake ballet being enacted on the pitch”
― Dean Cavanagh

“Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“It is not for nothing that an ominous feeling often attaches itself to a procession. In films and stories we see spectacles forming in the street and parades coming from around the corner, and we know to greet then with distrust and apprehension: their intent is still to be revealed.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“I did not see the hanging. They hanged him in front of the jail in Toronto, and You should have been there Grace, say the keepers, it would have been a lesson to you. I've pictured it many times, poor James standing with his hands tied and his neck bare, while they put the hood over his head like a kitten to be drowned. At least he had a priest with him, he was not all alone. If it had not been for Grace Marks, he told them, none of it would have happened.

It was raining, and a huge crowd standing in the mud, some of them come from miles away. If my own death sentence had not been commuted at the last minute, they would have watched me hang with the same greedy pleasure. There were many women and ladies there; everyone wanted to stare, they wanted to breathe death in like fine perfume, and when I read of it I thought, If this is a lesson to me, what is it I am supposed to be learning?”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Of course, there is no way to avoid being a hypocrite, even when seeking to remove oneself from the falseness of this material existence. And perhaps, this attribution of ‘falseness�� is not sufficiently accurate as a descriptor either; yet, how else is it to be articulated if something of it seems inauthentic and insincere as though existence itself were mediated through codes and objects and structures that constrained the domain of possibility, or rather relegated the notion of free will as becoming a reaction to prompts and the construct of independent action as having emerged from latent subsets of choices that presented themselves according to the dynamic interplay of obligation, code, preservation and groupthink?”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“We live in the society of the capitalist spectacle, mate, the more spectacular the better. Build it and they will come, as that old baseball movie says. We worship the event, the occasion, the unmissable show. We want Super Sunday, the Thriller in Manila, the showdown of the century…the things that bring the highest profits for the capitalist organisers. If you’re not at the event, you’re nobody. Life has passed you by. That’s the tyranny of the spectacle. Yet, if you think about it, the spectacle is the biggest joke of all �� because all the people at the event are desperate not to be losers. Who wants to be in a collection of people fleeing from fear of failure? Losers and the spectacle go together, the winners performing and the losers watching. The spectacle is how losers numb the pain, how they crave to be part of something, on the winning side for once. The LLN have decided to harness the society of the spectacle too, but not the capitalist version where small groups perform to large groups and get paid a fortune. Instead, the LLN offer the spectacle of life. And Revolution is the greatest spectacle of all.”
― Mike Hockney, The Last Bling King

“Pirmoji ekonomikos viešpatavimo socialiniame gyve- nime fazė į bet kokios žmogaus veiklos apibrėžtį įnešė aki- vaizdų nuopuolį, nurodantį perėjimą iš būti į turėti. Dabartinė fazė, nusakanti visišką socialinio gyvenimo užgrobimą remian- tis ekonomikos pasiekimais, stumia į visuotinę kaitą nuo turėti į atrodyti, iš kurios bet koks veiksmingas „turėti�� privalo būti išreikštas visuotiniu prestižu ir aukščiausiomis pareigomis. Tuo pačiu metu bet kokia asmeninė tikrovė tampa socialine, tiesiogiai priklausančia nuo visuomeninės valdžios, kurią ji ir suformavo. Vien dėl to, kad jos nėra, jai leista pasirodyti.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The future promises us all our very own Truman Shows and when every man and woman is a star the spectacle becomes auto- cannibalizing; the audience forced to watch itself due to lack of spectators”
― Dean Cavanagh

“Michel Foucault notait ainsi, à propos du regard clinique, sa "paradoxale propriété d'entendre un langage au moment où il perçoit un specatcle".”
― Aleberto Castoldi

“We'd rather have a grand spectacle of retribution of the 'wicked', than their silent walk towards redemption that our wishes questions the depth and nature of our love and hearts.”
― Ufuoma Apoki

“The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“Our world says that seeing is believing, but for us to behold the deep glory of the cross, we must see as God sees rather than as man sees. We treasure what is invisible and that is perhaps the greatest source of the spectacle tension in this age and of the Christian life. The great spectacle of Christ crucified is a spectacle for the ear, not a spectacle for the eye. For faith comes not by seeing, but by hearing.”
― Tony Reinke, Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age

“And then I think, maybe that’s what we are. An accidental spectacle.”
― Tracy K. Smith