Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

If it works, it's obsolete.

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.