One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.