Fantasy consists in a morbid fascination with unrealities, which secretly transforms itself into a desire to make them real. Imagination is a form of intellectual control, which presents us with the image of unrealities in order that we should understand and feel distanced from them. In imagination we dominate; in fantasy, we are dominated.

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.

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

The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.

Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.