The answer was surprising. The impediment to family faith was, in a word, men. They balked. Here were the common refrains: "Churches are always asking for money." "Church services are boring, predictable, routine, and irrelevant." "All you do is stand up and sit down." "I don't like being shamed." When he could speak just to men, he really found out the secret: men don't like being religious in public. It's not that they are not eager for the epiphanic experience; it's that they prefer it not to be displayed. Promise Keepers, the fundamentalist Christian group that fills football stadiums with men, has been hectored for its sexist policy, but it has understood male reticence. In the company of women, men don't want to be told to sing, to say stuff, or to give anything. They don't like losing control. They like the sense of voluntary activity, of doing something, of questing, exploring the edge on their own.

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

Benjamin smirked. "I have no sympathy for you. The books you stored away may be hoary with age, but they were written by children of the world, and they'll be taken from you by children of the world, and you had no business meddling with them in the first place."

"Ah, now you care to prophesy!"

"Not at all. 'Soon the sun will set'—is that prophecy? No, it's merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events. The children of the world are consistent too—so I say they will soak up everything you can offer, take your job away from you, and then denounce you as a decrepit wreck. Finally, they'll ignore you entirely. It's your own fault. The Book I gave you should have been enough for you. Now you'll just have to take the consequences of your meddling."

—Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

It is possible to conceive of men arrived at a degree of freedom that should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete equality of position, the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hand of God, will forever escape the laws of man. However democratic, then, the social state and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of a community will always find out several points about him which overlook his own position; and we may foresee that his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction. when inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.

 —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Within Christendom both the verbal and the visual have been employed to communicate the Christian story; in this regard, word and image have often been positioned as competitors, and the resulting standoff between the pair has generated a false dichotomy in both the art world and the church.

—Cameron Anderson, The Faithful Artist

A lot of research I've been doing has really been about differentiating between the sort of Catholic body-based imagery with a sensual, sexual kind of an aesthetic, versus what I see as this country's more dominant Protestant, Puritan-based approach. I see the latter as a more word-based, abstract-oriented, and more non-corporeal kind of an aesthetic. In fact one of the things I hypothesize is going on in the so-called culture war is that the aesthetic of Catholicism, which is a minority position in this country, is coming into conflict with the dominant Protestantism.

—Eleanor Heartley, quoted in Cameron Anderson, The Faithful Artist

Death with dignity normally is not thought to be secured simply by allowing to die: It must be imposed, even enforced, by imposing that strange "right" to die; in other words, by mercy killing. Do we not like the word killing? Unless it is just the sound we do not like, we dare not swallow the surrogates "right to die" and "death with dignity." If it is the thing in itself that we do not like, namely the killing of patients by their healthcare professionals, we must relentlessly expose the sugary words intended to help the "medicine," that deadly draft, go down.

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

Poe was fond of quoting a saying of Bacon's that "there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." This saying became known in France through Baudelaire's rendering of Poe and was often ascribed to Poe himself. It was taken to mean that the stranger one became the nearer one was getting to perfect beauty. And if we grant this view of beauty we must admit that some of the decadents succeeded in becoming very beautiful indeed. But the more the element of proportion in beauty is sacrificed to strangeness the more the result will seem to the normal man to be, not beauty at all, but rather an esoteric cult of ugliness. The romantic genius therefore denounces the normal man as a philistine and at the same time, since he cannot please him, seeks at least to shock him and so capture his attention by the very violence of eccentricity.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Sanger's writings make explicit her view that female fecundity is not natural and good, but pathological—a dangerous disease that needs to be treated and controlled. This view has become entrenched in our culture. Access to birth control and abortion are all but synonymous with "reproductive health", a clever term that sounds pro-woman but actually pathologizes natural biological realities that are unique to women, namely fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

Something in the American atmosphere, especially the atmosphere of the South and West, is fatal to literary periodicals. They start with a glow of health and promise but soon perish.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

Because of the impending war with England in 1811, patriotism in Kentucky reached such a pitch that the legislature passed a law forbidding attorneys to cite precedents from English courts since July 4, 1776.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

Contemporary art and the church are not synonymous. They are different spheres with different tasks. While they certainly overlap, they are categorically different. They are not different in the way that Presbyterians and Baptists are different, or in the way that abstraction and realism are different. Presbyterians and Baptists grow from the same soil of religion; abstraction and realism grow from the same soil of aesthetics. But art and church are different spheres with different roles, even though they intersect profoundly. I want my church to be a community of faith, worship, and service. I want it to respect and value art, but I do not want it to be an art community. Its constituencies and jobs are too diverse. In turn, I want my art community to respect and value the spiritual and theological, but I do not want it to be a surrogate church or a worship of aesthetics. It is not helpful to expect these different realms to fulfill each other's purposes.

—Wayne Roosa, "A Conversation Between Contemporary Art and the Church", in Contemporary Art and The Church: a Conversation Between Two Worlds, ed. W. David O. Taylor and Taylor Worley

When ambiguity becomes a widely welcomed aspect of art for insiders, public aspirations for concreteness and assurance are swiftly dashed. It is neither accidental nor coincidental that many of the most controversial artists of our time have explicitly declared the desirability of ambiguity.

—Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture

The collector Tony Ganz, whose parents owned a legendary collection of twentieth-century art, tells of having a playdate with a school friend at the age of six. On entering the house he said innocently, "Where are your Picassos?"

—Michael Findlay, The Value of Art

What's more, [Kraftwerk founding member Ralf] Hütter suspects that aesthetic luddites aren't always motivated by a proper Huxleyan suspicion of technological development at the expense of man and his soul but by hidebound prejudice, fear and loathing, even hypocrisy. "Yes, we were attacked, strangely enough by people who expected the latest and most up-to-date equipment when they went to the dentist," he told me. "They would not have liked to have had their bad teeth pulled out with pliers but they attacked us for being too mechanical. When it comes to music, they wanted old guitars from the fifties."

—David Stubbs, Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary new Music

The nobles demanded that the principal offices of state should be bestowed on men of family only, and that the commoners should be forbidden the use of arquebuses, pistols, and even of dogs, unless houghed, to prevent their being employed in the chase. They required, also, that the commoners should pay further seignorial duties to the proprietors of fiefs; that all pensions granted to the Third Estate should be suppressed, while their own body should be exempt from personal arrest and from all taxes on the product of their lands. They asked, further, a right to receive salt from the king's granaries at the same price as the merchants; and, finally, that the Third Estate should be obliged to wear a different dress from that of persons of family.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

The nobles of France unfortunately consider themselves rather as the countrymen of the nobles of all countries than as the fellow-citizens of Frenchmen.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

People establish a wine price comfort zone (and corresponding wine shelf) and stay there, moving up a row for special occasions and down a shelf for parties and other higher-volume purchases. A lot of factors drive this behavior, including fear. I have some $8 wine friends who are afraid to start drinking $12 wines for fear that they will be able to taste the difference—and have to upgrade their wine budgets.

—Mike Veseth, Wine Wars

"Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do," Arkadian Porphyrich says. "What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks. To be sure, repression must also allow an occasional breathing space, must close an eye every now and then, alternate indulgence with abuse, with a certain unpredictability in its caprices; otherwise, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole system rusts and wears down. Let's be frank: every regime, even the most authoritarian, survives in a situation of unstable equilibrium, whereby it needs to justify constantly the existence of its repressive apparatus, therefore of something to repress."

—Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

It was at that time also that the proconsul Cn. Manlius, after subduing the Galatians, introduced into Rome the luxury of Asia, more destructive than all hostile armies. It was then that iron bedsteads and expensive carpets were first used; then, too, that female singers were admitted at banquets, and other licentious abominations were introduced.

—Augustine, The City of God