Skip to content

It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch —
lightning.

— Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Another quote →

Topics

Music

More quotes by Tom Wolfe

A cult is a religion with no political power.

Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus … or off the bus."

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power.

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976)

Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power.

In Our Time (1980)

At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.

All Tom Wolfe quotes →

You may also like

The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.

Lucy Green

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Thomas Carlyle Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

Eduard Hanslick

Above the pitch, out of tune, and off the hinges.

François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Tom Wolfe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.