Quotes from Roger Kimball

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.

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?

In fact, Professor Showalter's proposals provide a sterling illustration of the way in which feminism has provided a kind of blueprint for special interests that wish to appropriate the curriculum in order to achieve political goals.

Kitsch lives with one foot in the realm of aesthetics and another foot in the realm of ethics.

The truth is that American universities are among the safest and most coddled environments ever devised by man. The idea that one should attend college to be protected from ideas one might find controversial or offensive could only occur to someone who had jettisoned any hope of acquiring an education.

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.

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.

Beauty is a fragile and vulnerable quality, and moreover one that is difficult to achieve; ugliness, by contrast, is unbreakable and invulnerable, and very easy to achieve.

Civilization is an achievement not a gift; it is always besieged, must constantly be defended, and once lost, is immeasurably difficult to reclaim. We see the results of the assaults against freedom all around us.

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.

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 Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?

Kitsch is a sentimentalization of reality in response to cultural failure. The greater the failure, the more malignant the sentimentalization.

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.

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.

Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic. —G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying

There is not much to say about Burrough's writing. It consists of semiliterate ravings by a very sick mind, a kaleidoscope or surrealistic depictions of drug-taking, violent, often misogynistic fantasy, and sexual depravity.

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 very concept of "ethnocentrism," which is used like a sledge-hammer to disparage the West, is a Western invention.

a meaningful politics must recognize other important values in human life. Indeed, politics makes no sense when it stands by itself. If the question who wields political power is not broadened to take account of what that power is to be used for-that is, what human values it will serve-then it reduces to a matter of who manages to subdue whom.*

And let's not forget "Dane-Geld": It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say: "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away." And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.

The Beats, like their successors in the Sixties, have often been described as 'idealists'. But fantasies of total gratification are not the product of idealism. They arise from a narcissism that, finding the world unequal to its desires, retreats into a realm of heedless self-absorption. Modesty, convention, and self-restraint then appear as the enemies rather than as the allies of humanity. In this sense, the Beat generation marks a step away from civilization.

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