Kyle Clewett

“Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live got to be as it is. No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.”
― Vivian Gornick, The End of The Novel of Love

“It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.”
― Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty

“No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“Every individual with “ideals” is a potential murderer.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a una texto implícito: Selección