To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm-a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.

Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past

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

In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.

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

Concerning no subject would [George Bernard] Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.