Quote of the Week

Perhaps the biggest reason why intellectuals excoriated entertainment was that they understood all too well their own precariousness in a world dominated by it. For whatever the overt content of any particular work, entertainment as a whole promulgated an unmistakable theme, one that took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego, of Dionysian abandon of Apollonian harmony. Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.
--Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality

Quote of the Week

Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either!
--James Baldwin, “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”, originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963

Quote of the Week

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
--Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Quote of the Week

Privilege is when your culture is taught as a core curriculum, and mine is taught as an elective.
--Jasmine Cho

A tip of the sombrero to fellow blogger Bluejay for introducing me to this quote.

Quote of the Week

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.
--Werner Herzog

Quote of the Week

Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.
--César Chávez

Quote of the Week

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.
--Roger Ebert

Quote of the Week

The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
--Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: a Survey of Human Life and Destiny

Quote of the Week

The enemy of political progress is the belief that nothing will ever really change. And indeed, if we believe that, we render it true.
--Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

Quote of the Week

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
-- Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans

Quote of the Week

There’s a place for digging into The Grapes of Wrath during a catastrophe like the Dust Bowl. Of course. But there’s also a place for Swing Time, and Swing Time may be even more important because it gives hope, it allows them to forget – and during that space of forgetting, they remember themselves and better times, and it gives them strength to go on.

It’s funny how people who claim to be Experts in film don’t get this, don’t understand the history, and … even more importantly … don’t seem to understand PEOPLE. How can you not understand human beings and consider yourself qualified to write about a popular artform like the movies?
--Sheila O'Malley, "Watch What You Want. Find Comfort Where You Can," The Sheila Variations, April 1, 2020.

Quote of the Week

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age. Even our generation has not yet rivaled the popularity of homosexualism in ancient Greece or Rome or Renaissance Italy.
--Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

Quote of the Week

Gabriel García Márquez and Yukio Mishima belong in the canon because they are brilliant writers, not because they conveniently fill a particular ethnic quota.
--Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India

Quote of the Week

Do you suppose Latin American writers, trying to mix literary modernism with revolutionary politics, resent our blue-eyed exploitation of their continent as a sort of compost heap of the libidinal and the symbolic? Aren't D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Paul Theroux imperialists? What do black Africans think of Conrad, Bellow, Updike and Edgar Rice Burroughs? Why don't the white guys look for the heart of darkness in their own bathrooms?
--John Leonard, "The Heroine: A Contraption of Attitudes", The New York Times, March 21, 1982