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Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself.

— Roger Kimball

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Beauty

More quotes by Roger Kimball

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)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

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