Quotation Archive:
Aldrich, William T.
"[F]ashion...originality: failure of memory."
"Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses."
Bellow, Saul
"Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is
now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate,
with an encyclopedia of clichés the first prize."
Bloom, Allan
"American high school graduates are among the most sensitive illiterates in the world."
Chesterton, G.K.
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
Connolly, Cyril
"Slums may be the breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs
are incubators of apathy and delirium."
Jarrell, Randall
"I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one
in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry."
La Rochefoucauld, FranÇois, duc de
"Truth does not do as much good in the world as the semblance of truth does evil."
"I’ve always been right-wing…I suppose I identify the Right with certain values
and the Left with certain vices…thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve
--those are the virtues…[the vices are] idleness, greed and treason."
Macdonald, Dwight
"[Mass culture] offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience,
for these demand effort."
"Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men."
"Life has no savor for [the man of excellence] unless he makes it consist
in service to something transcendental."
Pound, Ezra
"Literature is news that stays news."
Shaw, George Bernard
"Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making
cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices."
Simon, John
"Democracy encourages the majority to decide things
about which the majority is blissfully ignorant."
Smith, Logan Pearsall
"There is one thing that matters--to set a chime of words tinkling
in the minds of a few fastidious people."
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
Twain, Mark
"Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves
and how little we think of the other person."
"The need now is for order. This is not the age of reformation but of defence, when
every man of goodwill should devote all his powers to preserving the few good things
left to us from our grandfathers."
"The only source of authority whose title is unimpeachable at all times is knowledge.
But superiority in knowledge carries prerogative, which implies, of course, distinction and hierarchy."
Zappa, Frank
"Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing
people who can't talk for people who can't read."