18 Quotes by Michael Shindler

As in a longstanding civil war—art, religion, and all the other foot soldiers of history march with feet rising in contradiction and falling to the drumbeat of reconciliation toward a shared fate: a final battle and a final peace.

To become what it is now art required a great sacrifice: the aesthetic paradigm that had given man all his most beautiful things.

A theology that can function as an aesthetic makes for a religion that worships the beautiful at the expense of all else and an aesthetic that can function as a theology makes for an art that is expressive only of goodness.

As men require a heaping dose of dreams to reconcile themselves to waking life, so too does the hulking Leviathan of society require its dreams—which are films.

The would-be brute, by dreaming of medieval bloodbaths, finds himself uninterested in mere parking lot brawls and the would-be lothario, by dreaming of Sadean spoilations, loses his interest in venturing so mild a thing as an unsolicited kiss. In this way, dreams offer us all those things which our lives deny and by their extravagance, dull our daily denials.

Dreams offer us all those things which our lives deny and by their extravagance, dull our daily denials.

Whereas the pagans of yore groped after mystery in all the strange beauty of the world, the pagans of the 20th century, having supplanted nature with factories, saw the glimmer of the transcendental only in themselves. Hence, their longing for mystery—union in one sacred body, absolute order, and submission to an omnipotent lord—was manifested in an obscene eidolon palpable, for instance, in the Nazi motto, 'ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.

Abraham Lincoln described America as a 'nation conceived in Liberty' and our capitalist system is a consequence of that devotion to liberty: we are not free in order to engage in trade, rather we engage in trade because we are free to do so.

To make America’s least employable citizens dependent on the whims of the state, rather than their neighbors, is to clear a path for demagogues.