"I, too, think it's clear. Clear as day. She loves him."

"Not just loves him, she's in love with him!"

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.

—Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Fascism aestheticizes politics and communism answers with the politicization of art.

—Walter Benjamin, quoted in Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

At the 2016 summer Olympics Elaine Thompson of Jamaica won gold with a time of 10.71 seconds. In the same games, Usain Bolt, also of Jamaica, won with a time of 9.81 seconds. Although there was less than a second's difference between these two athletes, if men and women had been running in the same event, then Thompson wouldn't even have made it into the final race. In fact, she would have been easily out-run by Jamaican boys competing in the under-seventeen category, just as the United States women's national football team in 2017 were beaten by the Dallas under-fifteen boys' team, composed of boys who had just crossed the crucial puberty line and so had begun to develop the strength and power of adult men. The women's category has traditionally been protected in elite sports because, if it were not protected, there would be no women in elite sports—men would outcompete them every time.

—Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

Art is just very expensive stuff.

—James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld

To be modern in the 1990s means to be old-fashioned.

—Colleen McDaniel," Marketing Jesus: Warner Press and the Art of Warner Sallman," in David Morgan ed., Icons of American Protestantism

Man was not a part of nature, he had raised himself above nature, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him impious, even though he didn't believe in God, the more it seemed to him anthropologically impious, to scatter the ashes of a human being on the fields, the rivers or the sea. A human being had a conscience, a unique, individual, and irreplaceable conscience, and thus deserved a monument, a stele, or at least an inscription—well, something that asserts and bears witness to his existence for future centuries.

—Michel Houellenbecq, The Map and the Territory

"It's amazing what people will do. Look at the ancient Egyptians. They were some of the smartest people the world has ever known—we still don't know all their secrets—and yet they worshipped a tumblebug."

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

It was this unreality of character, this cartoonishness if you will, which was the secret of his appeal and what finally made his death so sad. Like any great comedian, he colored his environment wherever he went; in order to marvel at his constancy you wanted to see him in all sorts of alien situations: Bunny riding a camel, Bunny babysitting, Bunny in space. Now, in death, this constancy crystallized and became something else entirely: he was an old familiar jokester cast—with surprising effect—in the tragic role.

—Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Cloaked in the guise of a victim, she had unchecked power to oppress.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

The ultimate act of power isn't getting what you want, but rather sacrificing it willingly. Because that is an act of power over yourself, of power over power. And what kind of mortal has that?

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

Inaction is, after all, its own form of decision.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

The media themselves—which used to be organized vertically with print at the top, then film, television, radio, and comics in descending order—have been so shaken up that a Pulitzer Prize can go to a comic book about mice, whereas most of what is atop the New York Times best-seller list might be better used as bedding for mice.

—James B. Twitchell, Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture

The statue, Zerchi was dismayed to notice, bore a marked similarity to some of the most effeminate images by which mediocre, or worse than mediocre, artists had traditionally misrepresented the personality of Christ. The sweet-sick face, blank eyes, simpering lips, and arms spread wide in a gesture of embrace. The hips were broad as a woman's, and the chest hinted at breasts—unless those were only folds in the cloak. Dear Lord of Golgotha, Abbot Zerchi breathed, is that all the rabble imagine You to be? He could with effort imagine the statue saying: "Suffer the little children to come unto me," but he could not imagine it saying: "Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones," or flogging the money-changers out of the temple.

—Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

He snorted when I talked about how wonderful it might have been. "Wonderful," he said. "Do you know that one of the biggest cause of death in those days was people killing themselves?"

"How, killing themselves?"

"With weapons, like the ones I told you about; with poisons and drugs; by throwing themselves from high buildings; by employing oh any number of engines that the angels made for other reasons."

"And they did that deliberately?"

"Deliberately."

"Why?"

"For as many reasons as you have to say the time they lived in was wonderful."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

How rich the surplus of energies was by the seventeenth century one may partly judge by the high state of horticulture in Holland: when food is scarce one does not grow flowers to take its place.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

Literature of the first order, so far from being a mere pleasure-device, is a supreme attempt to face and encompass reality—an attempt beside which a busy working life involves a shrinkage and represents a partial retreat.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

An army is a body of pure consumers. As the army grew in size it threw a heavier and heavier burden upon productive enterprise: for the army must be fed and housed and equipped, and it does not, like other trades, supply any service in return except that of "protection" in times of war. In war, moreover, the army is not merely a pure consumer but a negative producer: that is to say, it produces illth instead of wealth—misery, mutilation, physical destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

In France, the first blast furnaces were not built till about 1550, and at the end of the century France had thirteen foundries, all devoted to the manufacture of cannon—the only other important article being scythes.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

[Plymouth Rock] has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show how all human power and greatness are entirely in the soul? Here is a stone which the feet of a few poor fugitives pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, a fragment is prized as a relic. But what has become of the doorsteps of a thousand palaces? Who troubles himself about them?

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America