13 quotes
Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself.
The very concept of "ethnocentrism," which is used like a sledge-hammer to disparage the West, is a Western invention.
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990)
As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control.
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (2000)
That is why the new schools of criticism have acquired a following: they promise to release us from the burden of study by showing that there is nothing after all to learn.
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990)
The institutionalization of the radical ethos in the academy has brought with it not only an increasing politicization of the humanities, but also an increasing ignorance of the humanistic legacy.
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990)
Incidentally, why is it that drug abuse is always described as an 'experiment', as if some important scientific enterprise were at stake instead of hedonistic self-indulgence?
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (2000)
What is not possible is to combine the pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of comfort with the characteristic pleasures of a strong mind. If you wish for luxury, you must not nourish the inquisitive instinct.
Since many older professors have themselves been the beneficiaries of the kind of traditional education they have rejected and are denying their students, it is the students who are the real losers in this fiasco.
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990)
In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (2000)
Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum expresses the fate of a culture’s dignity, its attitude toward its animating values.
The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (2012)
"History,” Bagehot wrote, “is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (2012)
The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.
The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (2012)
Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank - or to blame.
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (2000)