There is no doubt that her family sufferings were groundless, had negligible cause, and were ridiculously exaggerated; but if you have a wart on your nose or forehead, it seems to you that all anyone in the world does and has ever done is to look at your wart, laugh at it, and denounce you for it, though for all that you may have discovered America.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Dalí's rediscovered Catholicism had yet to produce the fruit of humility. "Now the new era of mystic painting," the Mystical Manifesto concludes, "begins with me." He took his own name to mean he was the "savior" of painting.

—Matthew J. Milliner, "Chagall's Cathedral," in Cameron Anderson ed., God in the Modern Wing

They knew it was an illusion, but they loved the illusion. It was a beautiful illusion. Plus, the illusion made good economic sense.

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies

I ordered a glass of beer and arranged my coins before me on the bar in columns according to value. When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

The human brain may be a lazy economist, but it is an absolutely outstanding lawyer, capable of persuasive argument and shrewd cross-examination. It can render damning evidence inadmissible and plead out your conscience, often without any time served.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

Of all the dangers in life, there is perhaps none more treacherous than getting precisely what you want. As it has been said, the mistakes we male and female mortals make when we have our own way persist in raising wonder at our fondness of it.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

There is nothing wrong with being rich. It is the rich who buy paintings. It is when you are bought by the rich that you will know you are successful artist.

—Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev

"Be like Mike," the Gatorade slogan promises. If you replenish your lost bodily fluids with their greenish slime, you will not only be drinking Michael Jordan's brand but will be participating in his majesty. This is what we have for the Eucharist.

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

What advertising does, and how it does it, has little to do with the movement of specific goods. Like religion, which has little to do with the actual delivery of salvation in the next world but everything to do with the ordering of life in this one, commercial speech has little to do with material objects per se but everything to do with how we perceive them.

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

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

A man, the wise have always insisted, should look with reverence but not with wonder on himself. Rousseau boasts that if not better than other men, he is at least different. By this gloating sense of his own otherwiseness he may be said to have set the tone for a whole epoch. Chateaubriand, for instance, is quite overcome by his own uniqueness and wonderfulness. At the most ordinary happenings he exclaims, as Sainte-Beuve points out, that such things happen only to him. Hugo again is positively stupefied at the immensity of his own genius. The theatricality that one feels in so much of the art of this period arises from the eagerness of the genius to communicate to others something of the amazement that he feels at himself.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Nothing quite gleams like a future project, forever the unspoiled crush-object seen from across the room.

—Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living

All the Axial religions, including ancient philosophical schools such as Stoicism and Confucianism, affirm the necessity of regulating desire in order to live in accord with nature—both with our bodies and with the whole of creation. Enlightenment progressivism, in contrast, objectifies nature as a force to be controlled. Control. That is the cornerstone of Sanger's ideology. This is not control over our passions and destructive desires, an ideal Sanger calls "an absurdity". This is control over biology, over nature herself. Sanger's vision of progress is an inversion of ancient wisdom. Rather than curbing our will to live in harmony with nature, we contort nature to unleash our will.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

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

Anything that promises to "organize" your life is going to take more time than simply continuing to wade through the mess.

—Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch

On graduating I went to France, by way of punishing my country for having failed to notice my presence.

—Roger Scruton, On Hunting

She understood that this was the reality of the music business, but the vision of going to Europe and advancing Tanner's career was too perfect to be defeated by reality.

—Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

She'd bought him the cheapest of cassette recorders, the kind of thing that an appliance store displayed to assure the buyers of other cassette recorders that they weren't getting the worst one.

—Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

The year before that, elsewhere in the pines, one man alone set sixty-nine fires. He was, at the time, a policeman in a town on the edge of the woods. After his actions became known, he was described by surprised neighbors as "a good family man" and "a nice guy." He himself "discovered" and reported all sixty-nine fires, usually calling them in on the police radio, and when he had been placed under arrest he couldn't explain why he had felt compelled to set the woods ablaze.

—John McPhee, The Pine Barrens

We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts