Selim Kuru

“In 1904, Californian journalist Lincoln Steffens published an exposé entitled The Shame of the Cities. Steffens wrote that “politics is business. In America politics is an arm of business and the aim of business is to make money without care for the law, because politics, controlled by business, can change or buy the law. Politics is interested in profit, not municipal prosperity or civic pride. The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American spirit.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Annotated Big Sleep

“If being in revolt against a corrupt society constitutes being immature, then Philip Marlowe is extremely immature” (Chandler, 1951).”
― Raymond Chandler, The Annotated Big Sleep

“Well, little by little that’s gonna mean that you can’t imagine a future that’s different from this one, and finally that there is no real place for negativity, for imagination, fantasy, and so forth. Therefore, one of the great… [Cough in the audience] laments of the Frankfurt School — as the postwar went on into the 1960s, and so forth — is that this society of late capitalism is removing all the possible spaces from which any negation of it could be achieved.”
― Fredric Jameson, Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory

“There is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Annotated Big Sleep