Bruce Thompson > Bruce's Quotes

“America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“You don’t understand the class structure of American society," said Smetana, "or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.”
― Whitttaker Chambers

“Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.”
― Henry Louis Mencken

“To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.”
― Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century

“It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“My generation has a giddy delight in dissolution. [...] To inspire the
unsophisticated young to demand "change" is an easy and a cheap trick— it was the tactic of the Communist Internationale in the thirties, another "movement.[...] We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group–irrespective of our
group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting
anybody over thirty; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act
upon them and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity. Though we had never met a payroll, fought for an education, obsessed about the rent, raised a child, carried a weapon for our country, or searched for work. Though we had never been in sufficient distress to call upon God, we indicted those who had. And continue to do so.”
― David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

“In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan—room and board included prepaid—and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods.”
― David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

“In retrospect people often seem embarrassed by that time--the late sixties into the seventies--as if suddenly confronted with some lunatic member of your family, once revered, now disgraced. Even John Lennon, who would hold on as much as anybody, would at one point have to declare, "Don't give me no more brother, brother." [...]

But, really, so much was accomplished, so much changed (and even less noticed, a lot held on to), that it seems inappropriate to be quite so uncomfortable with our past. For by refusing to accept the world as we were told to (most pointedly the war in Vietnam) we held on to many of the traditional values we had been taught, not the least of which was to demand accountability from our government. We shouldn't forget that a lot had to change. For America couldn't forever remain the child of the Hula-Hoop with the arsenal of Armageddon.”
― Ethan A. Russell (also "Ethan Russell"), Dear Mr. Fantasy: Diary of a Decade

“The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children--to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation.”
― David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

“They were and are children of privilege... the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a "liberal arts education" is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete - to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called developmental difficulty.”
― David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

“Have patience with the quarrelsomeness of the stupid. It is not easy to comprehend that one does not comprehend.”
― Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms

“Conquer, but never triumph.”
― Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms

“Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.”
― Joseph Epstein

“There is a tradition that jumping off a precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. And the tradition is thereby mocked - to the peril of us all.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.”
― Koren Zailckas, Fury: A Memoir

“But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on "despairing of life" in to a ripe old age. One cannot go on being "decadent", since decadence means falling and one can only said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude toward life and society.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“Later in the winter I'd tire of the snow, but Christmas snow was different.”
― Marie Landry, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

“Remember, if Christmas isn't found in your heart, you won't find it under a tree.”
― Charlotte Carpenter

“As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was a
contribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.”
― Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century

“Anthony Howard, then editor of the left-wing New Statesman, once pointed out that if Huey Long had only used left-wing phraseology he would have enjoyed wide support from the New York and London intelligentsia.”
― Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century

“In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth. In the Renaissance, while remaining the Queen of Heaven, she became also the human mother in whom everyone could recognise qualities of warmth and love and approachability...
The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, the religions which penetrate to every part of a man's being--in Egypt, India or China--gave the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male, and wouldn't have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include them both...It's a curious fact that the
all-male religions have produced no religious imagery--in most cases have positively forbidden it. The great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle.”
― Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

“How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.”
― Gregory Benford

“It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.”
― Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

“This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became a professor without holding a job outside academia. How can we expect these professors to adequately explain what people who oppose them believe?”
― Lee Doren, Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoid Indoctrination at College

“What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?”
― Wyndham Lewis, Letters

“The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled

“Art is the expression of an enormous preference.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Doom of youth