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"Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly. Manet's became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet's wake, abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots. Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas." Clement Greenberg   "All this you understand is only said about the petty skirmish of outposts, the fight of a corporal's guard, in which I am immediately concerned; I have more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of 'civilization,' which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of! And how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies. With this thought in my mind, all the history of the past is lighted up and lives again to me. I used really to despair once because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself: happily I know now that all that will have a sudden check—sudden in appearance I mean—'as it was in the days of Noë.'" William Morris   "In an artistic work of true beauty the content ought to be nil, the form everything: by form man is influenced in his entirety; by content in his separate faculties only. The secret of great artists is that they cancel matter through form; the more imposing the matter is in itself, the greater its obstinacy in striving to emphasize its own particular effect, the more the spectator inclines to lose himself immediately in the matter, so much more triumphant is the art which brings it into subjection and enforces its own sovereign power." Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller   "The grid, the load-bearing frame and light skin of the new buildings, came to Europe from the Chicago School, whose leader was Louis Sullivan. The Bauhaus ideal of the open plan was transmitted to Germany by Frank Lloyd Wright. Adolf Loos' messianic rejection of ornament in the early 1900s, which became such a fetish with the International Stylists, came straight out of his infatuation with American machine culture. Le Corbusier derived a good deal of his architectural syntax from the 'functional' shapes of American grain elevators, docks and airplanes. And when European modernists in the early twenties dreamed up their Wolkenkratzer ('cloud-scratcher'), the nearest the German language could come to the alien Yankee concept of a skyscraper, critics accused the modernists of deserting their native traditions and caving in to transatlantic cultural imperialism." Robert Hughes   "I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I oppose it now, I'll oppose it after the election, and I'll oppose it as President." Hillary Clinton   "There were babies conceived on the First Fleet. These infants were free British subjects. So before it began, this 'penal colony' was producing free people who grew up to call it home and thought of it as a nation in the making. Not even in its first year was this society composed just of convicts and their guards." John Hirst   "Iran is a land of literature, and the discussions in Nafisi's classroom, as she evokes them, exude a natural and easy fervor—the intensity of students who feel keenly about books and writers and the entanglements of literature and life. But there is something manic about this classroom intensity. Some of her students are Islamists, and they have their opinions. The Islamist students want to interrogate literature through the prism of their own ideology; want to draw moral lessons, or perhaps theological lessons; want to point fingers. They want to be ferocious; and they succeed. One of the students tells the class, 'All through this revolution we have talked about the fact that the West is our enemy, it is the Great Satan, not because of its military might, not because of its economic power, but because of, because of'—another pause—'because of its sinister assault on the very roots of our culture.' And the student holds aloft a copy of The Great Gatsby." Paul Berman   "If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends." James Graham Ballard   "The first of the Scipios opened the way for the world power of the Romans; the second opened the way for luxury. For, when Rome was freed of the fear of Carthage, and her rival in empire was out of her way, the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in headlong course. The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new. The state passed from vigilance to slumber, from the pursuit of arms to the pursuit of pleasure, from activity to idleness." Velleius Paterculus   "It used to take 260 hours of work to buy a bicycle—now it takes 7 hours. It used to take 2 hours of work to buy a dozen oranges—now it takes 6 minutes." Andrew Leigh   "After work the Germans work some more, while the English enjoy themselves at games and sport." Karl Kraus   "Because Prussianism is masculinity carried to a point of enormity and obscenity even, that is what we women are fighting against in every land and in every race, we are fighting against that over-sexuality that we women have always been trying to break down; for women to be recognized as half of humanity." Emmeline Pankhurst   "First, no one can approve professions that arouse people's dislike, for example, collectors of harbour dues or usurers. Again, all those workers who are paid for their labour and not for their skill have servile and demeaning employment; for in their case the very wage is a contract to servitude. Those who buy from merchants and sell again immediately should also be thought of as demeaning themselves. For they would make no profit unless they told sufficient lies, and nothing is more dishonourable than falsehood. All handcraftsmen are engaged in a demeaning trade; for there can be nothing well bred about the workshop. The crafts that are least worthy of approval are those that minister to the pleasures: fishmongers, butchers, cooks, poulterers, fishermen as Terence puts it; add to this, if you like, perfumers, dancers, and the whole variety show." Marcus Tullius Cicero   "I want to make government cool again." Barack Obama   "Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? One has to reply that this is the most pitiful and worthless liberal prejudice. The whole question is: Who is applying compulsion, to whom, and for what purpose? What state, what class, under what conditions, by what methods? Even the serf-owning organisation was, in certain conditions, a step forward, and led to an increase in the productivity of labour. Productivity increased enormously under capitalism, that is, in the epoch of free buying and selling of labour-power on the market. But free labour, along with capitalism as a whole, having entered the stage of imperialism, blew itself up in the imperialist war. The whole world economy entered a period of bloody anarchy, of monstrous upheavals, of impoverishment, degeneration and destruction of the masses. Can we, in these circumstances, talk about the productivity of free labour, when the fruits of this labour are being destroyed ten times as fast as they are created? The imperialist war and its aftermath revealed that it is impossible for society to go on any longer on the basis of free labour." Lev Davidovich Bronshtein   "The ordinary wage-earner feels, and shows that he feels, the need of superior leadership. He is looking about and crying out for true leadership. He desires the help of those who are wiser and stronger than he is himself. All of us do. Inequality is in the Bible from beginning to end accepted as a fact; but the superiors in strength are enjoined to use their superiority not for themselves but for others, following the example of Christ. When the inequalities among men are frankly acknowledged, the duty of those of who are favored by the differences among men becomes apparent." Richard Theodore Ely   "The problems we expect government to handle are themselves highly complex, and internalizing complexity in a centralized bureaucracy does not make it go away; it merely assigns it to an institution likely to be uniquely ill-suited to handling it." Yuval Levin   "Policies are apt to be more successful if they can be reversed once they start to go awry, and so good planners ensure reversibility. Officials should assume that there will be surprises, that things will inevitably turn out quite differently than anticipated. Human beings will be extremely inventive, and move in unexpected directions, some of them perhaps destructive to your plans. (This is not bad advice for people attempting to 'plan' their lives as well.)" Cass Sunstein   "Within each species, no two animals use violence in exactly the same ways—some are hotheads, others pacifists—but overall each species evolves through natural and sexual selection toward an equilibrium in the amount and kind of violence it uses. That equilibrium is determined by the species' physical endowments, environment, prey, predators, and competitors, and a host of other factors. As animals' environments change, so do their patterns of violence, with the result that across the last 1.3 million years, bonobos and chimpanzees have diverged so far from their last common ancestor that while the former hardly ever kill each other, roughly 10 to 15 percent of the latter die from intraspecies violence. The figure is very similar among human foragers." Ian Morris   "The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery—in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues—are animal: a consequence of that drive that teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal." Friedrich Nietzsche   "What fed the tyranny was nothing other than inaction, the refusal to speak up against anything it wanted. Overcome by the pleasure of peace, we learned to live like slaves. Even those of us who suffered irremediable disaster, or saw it happen to our neighbours, were afraid of dying bravely. Death in the depths of shame was all we could expect." Titus Flavius Josephus   "The trouble with much of our legislation is that the legislator has mistaken emotion for wisdom, impulse for knowledge, and good intention for sound judgment. 'He means well' is a sweet and wholesome thing in the field of ethics. It may be of small consequence, or of no consequence at all, in the domain of law. 'He means well' may save the legislator from the afflictions of an accusing conscience, but it does not protect the community from the affliction of mischievous and meddlesome statutes." George Sutherland   "The primary story about Jesus is deeply hostile to churches, yet this story has survived for two thousand years because of the Christian church founded in his name. Without the institution, the story would probably have been lost. There is not the slightest doubt that Mark's Jesus would despise the Church of Rome, and the principles on which it is founded." John Carroll   "In his 1973 book on Joyce, Joysprick, Burgess made a provocative distinction between what he calls the 'A' novelist and the 'B' novelist: the A novelist is interested in plot, character and psychological insight, whereas the B novelist is interested, above all, in the play of words. The most famous B novel is Finnegans Wake, which Nabokov aptly described as 'a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.' The B novel, as a genre, is now utterly defunct; and A Clockwork Orange may be its only long-term survivor. It is a book that can still be read with steady pleasure, continuous amusement and—at times—incredulous admiration. Anthony Burgess, then, is not 'a minor B novelist,' as he described himself; he is the only B novelist." Martin Amis   "Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at." Arthur Danto   "To think there are idiots who derive consolation from the fine arts. Like my Aunt Bigeois: 'Chopin's Preludes were such a help to me when your poor uncle died.' And the concert halls overflow with humiliated, outraged people who close their eyes and try to turn their pale faces into receiving antennae. They imagine that the sounds they receive flow into them, sweet and nourishing, and that their sufferings become music, like those of young Werther; they think that beauty is compassionate towards them." Jean-Paul Sartre   "My desires are a modest cottage with thatched roof, but a good bed, good fare, fresh milk and butter, flowers by my window, and a few fine trees before the door. And if the Lord wished to fill my cup of happiness, he would grant me the pleasure of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanged on those trees. With a heart moved to pity, I would before their death forgive the injury they had done me during their lives. Yes, we ought to forgive our enemies—but not until they are hanged." Heinrich Heine   "Learning to travel is largely about learning to wait, and the more remote the location, the more waiting there is to do. But, equally, the more remote the location the more waiting takes on the quality of meditation." Geoff Dyer   "When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business—that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. But we begin at last to understand that these things are important only to one's own consciousness, which is but as a globule of dew on a rose-leaf that at midday there will be no trace of." Mary Ann Evans   "Leisure—the word from which our word 'school' is derived—was for the Greek the expression of the highest moments of the mind. It was not labor; far less was it recreation. It was that employment of the mind in which by great thoughts, by art and poetry which lift us above ourselves, by the highest exertion of intelligence, as we should add, by religion, we obtain occasionally a sense of something that cannot be taken away from us, a real oneness and center in the universe; and which makes us feel that whatever happens to the present form of our little ephemeral personality, life is yet worth living because it has a real and sensible contact with something of eternal value." Irving Babbitt   "I'm objecting to this reductive approach to art in often nakedly ideological fashion over the last, you know, it's really thirty years going on forty years now, ok. The ideological approach to art. I would say that's probably the dominant concept at the elite schools, at the elite universities in the United States, ok, that art is ideological, that art is a tool of ideology. And so the students at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level are encouraged to approach the artwork in terms of what the artwork is doing wrong, ok, or what the artwork is hiding." Camille Paglia