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

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

Like other theological disputes, the authorship dispute is over origins: Where did these works come from? What circumstances, influences, and qualities of mind made them possible? What was this genius from which they emanated? Seeing the origin of the works in the man from Stratford, traditionalists are, in the terminology of the dispute, Stratfordians—defenders of the faith; orthodox believers in the one true church. The heretics banging their ninety-five theses against the church door are anti-Stratfordians—against Stratford as the origin—but their quest for truth has splintered them into sects, sometimes warring but loosely affiliated under the sign of their dissent from orthodoxy: Baconians, Marlovians, Oxfordians, Sidneyans, Nevillians, and others, each named according to their god.

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

Around the mid-nineteenth century, however, the field began to professionalize. A discipline called English literature arose, founded on and formed around Shakespeare. It arose, first and foremost, as a substitute for religion. For centuries, Christianity had exerted a pacifying influence on the population, encouraging values of meekness and self-sacrifice, and unifying all classes, from the richest congregant to the pious peasant, under a single ideology. But by the Victorian period, religion was threatened by scientific discovery and social change. Church attendance among the working classes was falling. Social unrest seemed to be building. The church was losing its hold on the masses, and the Victorian ruling class worried that, without religion to encourage morality and restraint, something like the French Revolution could happen in Britain. A new religion was needed; a discourse that could provide the unifying, pacifying function formerly provided by Christianity. As the scholar Terry Eagleton writes, "If one were to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than to reply: 'the failure of religion.'"

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

To Brother Librarian, whose task in life was the preservation of books, the principal reason for the existence of books was that they might be preserved perpetually. Usage was secondary, and to be avoided if it threatened longevity.

—Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

Who is the wise man who will be ready to hang himself because he does not know how to see God face to face, and because his reason cannot unravel the mystery of the Trinity? One might as well despair over not having four feet and two wings. Why make us hate our nature? Our existence is not so unhappy as they try to make us think. To look upon the universe as a dungeon, and all mankind as criminals who are goin g to be executed, is the idea of a fanatic. To believe that the world is a place of delight, where one should experience nothing but pleasure, is the dream of a Sybarite. To think that the earth, men, and animals are what they must be, according to the law of providence, is, I believe, the part of a wise man.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

Wordsworth's paradoxes about children have a similar origin. A child who at the age of six is a "mighty prophet, seer blest" is a highly improbable not to say impossible child. The "Nature" again of "Heart-Leap Well" which both feels and inspires pity is more remote from normal experience than the Nature "red in tooth and claw" of Tennyson.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The postmodern understanding of truth-as-power leads to a postmodern political praxis, in which language is intentionally manipulated to institute these new modes of reality. This is why there is so much emphasis on policing speech—creating new pronouns and mandating their use, constantly changing the definitions of terms like gender, continually proliferating new categories of and subcategories of identity and desire. This is a concerted effort to enforce a new truth-script through an exercise of power.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

Out of the turmoil incidental to the Great Revival came a number of schisms among the evangelical denominations active in the West. Doctrinally conservative, the Presbyterians were quick to scent heresy and to throw out the unorthodox. As a result, they soon began to divide by fission. New Lights, Cumberland Presbyterians, Seceders, Old School and New School Presbyterians, and many other names for dissident groups indicate the division within the ranks. The Baptists and Methodists were also riven by controversy. But these sectarian divisions owe less to the frontier than they do to the beliefs implicit in Protestantism. They merely illustrate a tendency which had been in operation since the Reformation. When the Reformers conceded that men could read and interpret the Scriptures according to the dictates of their consciences and could dispense with a priest as intercessor with God, they opened a Pandora's box which they could never close thereafter.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

To vote Conservative was part of Matthew's religion.

—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Sometimes we find ourselves misguidedly defending by deductive argument what ought to be presented by historical affirmation. Christians must always be prepared to display, as far as they are able, the rational quality of the faith they profess. But we must beware of defending primarily as theories doctrines which are essentially descriptions of facts.

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

The Christian mind has allowed itself to be subtly secularized by giving a purely chronological status to the eternal. That is to say, the Christian has relegated the significance of the eternal to the life that succeeds this one. In doing so, it has enabled itself to come to terms with the secular mind on a false basis. The basis is that here and now Christians and secularists can share the same conceptions, attitudes, and modes of action within the temporal sphere, since the essential difference between them—i.e. the dispute whether or not there is God's eternity beyond this world—is one which begins to be applicable only when this life is ended.

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

The doctor had read Voltaire, Constantin de Volney and Rousseau: he believed strongly in the general will, as exercised by himself.

—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

Paintings are not made to decorate apartments. They are instruments of offensive and defensive war against the enemy.

---Pablo Picasso, quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Fauvism