The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.

Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the system of necessity.Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.