The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies – socialist politics and modernist art – have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body’s dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.
Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.
When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment.
The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
Like adverts, today’s works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.
There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.
In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was “kitsch.” Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn’t be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.
A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political, legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.
The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.
Nothing is more useful than the useless.
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price – it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave.