Western Canon Quotes

#1. My history teacher could make us feel like he was imparting rare gossip to us when he was talking about Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs. I just loved that sense of - the Western canon is here, and it's gossipy and tawdry, and everyone is sort of goofy.

Mallory Ortberg

#2. Eighty per cent of my output is 'Mallory clowns on the Western canon,' and I'm happy to be that person.

Mallory Ortberg

#3. To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.

Harold Bloom

#4. If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

Harold Bloom

#5. The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

Brian Ferneyhough

#6. You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

Evelyn Waugh

#7. Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

William Morris

#8. Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.

Cornelia Otis Skinner

#9. The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

Harold Bloom

#10. I was raised in a bit of a hippie environment. I was lying around naked until I was two, having a good time. I think the California mentality is laid back and I definitely embody that.

Urijah Faber

#11. When I work on something I'm not excited about or not as proud of it as I'd like to be, then I try to work even harder to make the next one and address those insecurities, I tackle insecurities rather than run from them.

David Gordon Green

#12. Money does not guarantee success.

Jose Mourinho

#13. There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.

Noam Chomsky