Survival of the Prettiest

 

“Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is inconsequential… it should not have a place in intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has become an embarrassment.

But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight…We can say that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm between the real world and our understanding of it.”

 

“‘I don’t feel less because I’m in the presence of a beautiful person. I dont go, oh, I’ll never be that beautiful! What a ridiculous attitude to take! …When men look at sports, when they look at football, they don’t go, oh, I’ll never be that fast!, I’ll never be that strong!’ -Camille Paglia”

 

 “Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self.”

 

“Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit.”

 

Lost In the Cosmos

 

“You live in a deranged age – more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

 

 

“…the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.”

 

The Psychopath Test

 

“There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.”

 

 

“I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.”

~

“We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.”