"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

"I often discuss and argue with him, always about similar thoughts, gentlemen; but most often he produces such absurdities that one's ears fall off, not a groatsworth of plausibility!"

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Conceived as a replacement for religion, English was institutionalized at the height of the Victorian deification of Shakespeare, swapping the old Judeo-Christian God for one that Britain had ready at hand. "An institution," Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "is the lengthened shadow of one man." And the Academic institution of English literature, as the scholar Nancy Glazener writes, can be understood as a shadow cast by Shakespeare, though this shadow is "an effect of Shakespeare's having been positioned and lit retrospectively."

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

Art is just very expensive stuff.

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

"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

"Man is the most destructive creature there is, Mr. Midge."

Melba said, "Except for goats. Look at Greece."

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

There's a period going past at the moment that may make us look as though we're in fashion.

—David Sylvian, interview, 1981

The works of Kruger, Holzer, Koons, and Schnabel are not so much over the top as they are far down the other side.

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

Like the word weed, with which it shares many interesting traits, junk is a matter of opinion. It is not a specific item or class of items per se. Rather it is what we call certain objects as we are on our way to root them out. Often the weeds become so interesting, or so indomitable, that we call them wildflower gardens instead.

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

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

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The Bible shows that poverty will be abolished through godly productivity and rising real wealth. The biblical answer is not, as the saying goes, to redistribute the pie, but to make a bigger pie.

—David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators

It was in reference to this eulogy on Cromwell that Waller made to King Charles II the reply found in Bayle's dictionary. The King, to whom Waller had just presented, according to the custom of kings and poets, a poem stuffed with praise, reproached him with having done better for Cromwell. Waller replied: "Sir, we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth." That answer was not so sincere as the one made by the Dutch ambassador who, when the same king complained that people had less respect for him than for Cromwell, said, "Ah, sir, that Cromwell was something else again."

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

"What fire shown from my two eyeballs, and dimmed the glitter of the stars, as the local poets pointed out to me."

—The old woman, in Voltaire, Candide

In a country so vast and so ancient as India you can find in some place or some period or other almost anything you like.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

No one would accuse criticism at present of lacking flexibility. It has grown so flexible in fact as to become invertebrate.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

To the younger portion of the community, which constitutes everywhere the very great majority, the subject of dress is one of intense and paramount importance. An author who treats it appeals, like the poet, to the young men and maidens, and calls upon them, by all motives which habitually operate most strongly upon their feelings, to buy his book. When, after opening their purses for this purpose, they have carried home the work in triumph, expecting to find some particular instruction in regard to the tying of their neckcloths, or the cut of their corsets, and meet with nothing better than a dissertation on Things in General, they will—to use the mildest term—not be in very good humor. If the last improvements in legislation, which we have made in this country, should have found their way to England, the author, we think, would stand some chance of being lynched.

—North American Review, October 1835, on Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

But for the grace of God, one would have to say that mankind is afflicted with a terminal case of idiocy. It all goes back to Adam. There he was, in paradise, standing next to a naked lady, Eve, and all he does is to munch on an apple, or whatever that piece of fruit was.

—R. J. Rushdoony, To Be as God

Swinburne's poetry is like a bowl of sugar at one's dinner. It is self-consciously poetic, and it cloys and disgusts.

—R. J. Rushdoony, To Be as God

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

—Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living