Quotes by Cultural Critics - Page 3

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Barzun
History is not coherent; moreover, the politics of coherence tend to drive history in the least tolerable directions.
Joshua Clover
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.
Slavoj Žižek
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
Walter Benjamin
Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something g
Slavoj Žižek
In any assembly the simplest way to stop the transacting of business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
Jacques Barzun
Empowerment wasn't defined as a static concept or standalone occurrence, but as an evolving way to rethink entire power structures and value systems, draw on shared skills and knowledge, and endow marginalized communities with tools for economic sustainability.
Andi Zeisler
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
In a time of feminism taken into account, there's a sense that if one's choices--even in something as minor as a favorite chill-out show--can't be rationalized, they should probably be kept quiet. As with most-feminist movies and most-feminist underpants, this suggests that feminism is a unvarying foundation of a larger system. It suggests feminism is something that either is or is not okay to consume, rather than a sense through which creators and audiences see stories, characters, and communication.
Andi Zeisler
Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')
Matthew Arnold
Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.
Walter Benjamin
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Walter Benjamin
Equality makes way for an increased number of free, considered choices, and an increased number of people with access to them. But choice itself isn't the same as equality...
Andi Zeisler
Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.
Matthew Arnold
Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.
Slavoj Žižek
I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (...) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.
Slavoj Žižek
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
Matthew Arnold
Poetry is simply the most beautiful impressive and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold
Prose divides shame into stations.
Wayne Koestenbaum
Teaching is not a lost art but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun
Like vampires and extremely rich people, black folk can sense one another. Use your Spidey Sense (Blacky Sense?). Use your blackdar to inspect the workplace for signs of Other Negroes. They may be working security for the building. They may be in administrative support. They may be among the associate pool, or they may even be in upper management. Black folk can be anywhere. After all, you're here. But one of the biggest mistakes you can make as The Black Employee is to assume you are the only one.
Baratunde R. Thurston
Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.
Slavoj Žižek
History is written by the victors.
Walter Benjamin
If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.
Baratunde R. Thurston
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.
Matthew Arnold
We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'.
Roger Kimball
I am a citizen-at-large, of everywhere and nowhere, so sometimes I get pretty homesick.
Rich Benjamin
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
Slavoj Žižek
Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
Walter Benjamin
What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.
Walter Benjamin
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.
Walter Benjamin
Only he who can view his past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
Walter Benajmin
Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.
Henry A. Giroux
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,Showed me the high, white star of Truth,There bade me gaze, and there aspire.Even now their whispers pierce the gloom'What dost thou in this living tomb?
Matthew Arnold
We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to ple's control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera: no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, unless this is understood, the solution sought will involve applying democratic mechanisms (which, of course, can have a positive role to play)- mechanisms, one should never forget, which are themselves part of the apparatus of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." it is the "democratic illusion" the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations.
Slavoj Žižek
If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed.
Slavoj Žižek
The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: “We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Where did the somewhat awkward “pursuit of happiness” come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property— the latter was replaced by “the pursuit of happiness” during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves’ right to property.
Slavoj Žižek
Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.
Walter Benjamin
The cliche about prison life is that I am actually integrated into it, ruined by it, when my accommodation to it is so overwhelming that I can no longer stand or even imagine freedom, life outside prison, so that my release brings about a total psychic breakdown, or at least gives rise to a longing for the lost safety of prison life. The actual dialectic of prison life, however, is somewhat more refined. Prison in effect destroys me, attains a total hold over me, precisely when I do not fully consent to the fact that I am in prison but maintain a kind of inner distance towards it, stick to the illusion that ‘real life is elsewhere’ and indulge all the time in daydreaming about life outside, about nice things that are waiting for me after my release or escape. I thereby get caught in the vicious cycle of fantasy, so that when, eventually, I am released, the grotesque discord between fantasy and reality breaks me down. The only true solution is therefore fully to accept the rules of prison life and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work out a way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming about Life Elsewhere in effect enchain me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by prison rules, opens up a space for true hope.
Slavoj Žižek
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin
Pure sex is masturbation with a real partner who functions as a prop for our indulging in fantasies, while it is only through love that we can reach the … Other.
ZIZEK
Languages are not strangers to on another.
Walter Benjamin
With the million or more words contained in the English language, one notorious word has been able to stand out and hold its title as the most physically demanding. Violence; a word commonly bestowed upon embellished acts of crude conflict, and physical contact. The word has never brought good feelings, or good thoughts, but rather emotions of unpleasant behavior due to the severity of its nature. Over the years, violence has evolved from a basic skirmish, to an array of things. Violence in modern day time is now being used to install fear, and to persuade innocent individuals into doing whatever the perpetrator desires, such as: personal gain, rape, and advancement of power. Every day another innocent person is being robbed, and demeaned by violent characters lurking the dark streets. Not only has violence been an ongoing epidemic, but it’s only getting worse as the years go on. We see horrendously violent acts being committed every day.
Slavoj Žižek
The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.
Slavoj Žižek
What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.
Walter Benjamin
Resolve to be thyself and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
Walter Benjamin
There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace.
Judith Shulevitz
We forget because we must And not because we will.
Matthew Arnold
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game and do it by watching first some high-school or small-town teams
Jacques Barzun
How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition ... The psychoanalytic name for this obscene injunction for this obscene call, ENJOY, is superego. The problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions and to be able to spontaneously enjoy. The problem is how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy.
Slavoj Žižek
, And you, ye stars,Who slowly begin to marshal,As of old, the fields of heaven,Your distant, melancholy lines!Have you, too, survived yourselves?Are you, too, what I fear to become?You, too, once lived;You, too, moved joyfullyAmong august companions,In an older world, peopled by Gods,In a mightier order,The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven.But now, ye kindleYour lonely, cold-shining lights,Unwilling lingerersIn the heavenly wilderness,For a younger, ignoble world;And renew, by necessity,Night after night your courses,In echoing, unneared silence,Above a race you know not—Uncaring and undelighted,Without friend and without home;Weary like us, though notWeary with our weariness.
Matthew Arnold
Was 9/11 not the 20th congress of the American Dream?
Slavoj Žižek
The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.
Walter Benjamin
Treating feminism like it's a personal accessory that just isn't appropriate anymore obscures the places where feminism hasn't made strides for people who still need it.
Andi Zeisler
Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.
Jacques Barzun