American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.