Pillsonista

“Learned books are published by the thousand, yet learning was never less trusted as something to be pursued for its own sake. Too often used for ill, it is now asked about its use for good, and usually on the assumption that any goodwill be measurable on a market, like a commodity.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“Readers my age were made to memorize and recite: their yawns of boredom were discounted. Younger readers have been spared such indignities. Who was lucky? Isn't a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a form of therapy? In a course called Classical Studies taught by teachers who possess scarcely a word of Latin or Greek, suffering is avoided, but isn't it true that nothing is gained except the absence of suffering?... What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel excluded?”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“A culture can never flourish as a hedge against the world. It isn't a bastion for nationalism, it is an international passport.”
― Clive James, Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays

“Our vanity sets too much importance on the role that we play in the world. The Parisian bourgeois laughs at the small-town bourgeois; the nobleman at Court mocks the provincial noble; the well-known man disdains the unknown man, forgetting that time will do equal justice to their various pretensions, and that they will all look equally ridiculous or trivial in the eyes of generations to come.”
― François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800