It must always be remembered, however, that it is the luxuries, and not the necessary expense of the inferior ranks of people, that ought ever to be taxed.
We grew up in a very material-lacking socialist society, but today China is a capitalist society. It's very materialistic. It's full of desire and luxury goods.
If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.
Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.
If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I've also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.
Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know
If theater is ritual, then dance is too... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.