Roger Kimball famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.
-- Roger Kimball

#Taken #Years #Culture
It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God˜an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than _de trop_: it is an impediment to perfection.
-- Roger Kimball

#Attitude #Practice #Perfection
Intelligence, like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring, from its application.
-- Roger Kimball

#Fire #Intelligence #Moral
Welcome to the information age. Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.
-- Roger Kimball

#Data #Age #Information
What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.
-- Roger Kimball

#Civilization #House #Achievement
Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow.
-- Roger Kimball

#Simplicity #May #Complexity
Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
-- Roger Kimball

#Beauty #Art #Idols

President Bartlet: There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room.
As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty â€“ to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
Iâ€™m not a fan of â€˜write what you know.â€™ If you donâ€™t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing â€˜The Year of Living Biblically.â€™ That was kind of the point â€“ to learn.
Music knows no barrier of age or culture. It isnâ€™t about being politically correct or even making a statement. Music is what appeals to the ears and touches your soul.
The experience of being on a show that is very much in the center of popular culture is exciting. You really feel like you're reaching people.
France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.
How many actors have a shot at being a part of something that became a part of pop culture? It's been very rewarding. I'm not getting the 20 million bucks for the new movies, but at least I'm getting warmth and recognition from people wherever I go.
I'm of Nigerian descent, from the Yoruba tribe. Names are very significant in that culture. It basically states your purpose in life.
The exclusion of true esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times. At first this was done via the establishment of the popular idealism of exoteric religious institutions in league with the State. But in modern times the same process is done by the strategic exclusion of conventional religious cultism, mystical idealism, and higher evolutionary Wisdom from the mechanisms of popular culture.

Roger Kimball famous quotes

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