Quotes 41 till 60 of 61.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
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The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
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The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
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Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
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War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ''realistically;'' that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent - war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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