22 Quotes by Roger Kimball

Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, 'We'll get you through your children!' For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true.

Welcome to the information age. Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.

Intelligence, like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring, from its application.

Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.

What the historian Elie Kedourie called “the Chatham House Version” – that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization – everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.

Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow.

Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, ‘We’ll get you through your children!’ For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true.

It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible” – capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from – that they are not in fact often subject to – wild and perverse misinterpretation.