Heaven we believe in: Hell we are familiar with.
What ends an episode of mass psychosis? Only fatigue.
For every piece of pornography, no matter how crude or explicit, critics can be found to praise its bold, transgressive, sophisticated commentary on the acts in question.
If you think, you might not act, and if you don’t act, how can you be an activist?
Your friends will generally put up with whatever hideous thing you say to them, as long as it isn’t true.
A regular reviewer, whose fodder must by its nature be mostly mediocre or worse, can discharge his responsibilities to his readers only by continual pans, often of his friends and acquaintances; and this is more than human nature can bear.
Revolutions are staffed by those who expect to gain from the coming order, but led by those who expect to suffer, whose negligence of personal considerations betokens their righteousness, and whose zeal is commensurate with their expectation.
Humans always segregate — on their most observable characteristics, when left to themselves; when interfered with, on characteristics less observable.
Great geniuses, Emerson said, have the shortest biographies. They do not: but for most of us our personal history is all that we are and for them it is next to nothing.
Aesthetics trumps not just politics but ethics.