Michael Kinsley Quotes

Denmark is like a Sylvanian world, but one thing it breeds is malady. The malady is generally in good taste. Opinions are correct. That is the chief enemy of creativity.

After world war all we got was a lot of conformity, and conservatism and when I was in college at the university of Illinois the skirt lengths dropped instead of going up as they had during the roaring twenties and I knew that was a very bad sign, and it is symbolic and reflective of a very repressive time, and some of that was laid the feet of the cold war.

Everything's getting homogenized. It seems to me like music and behavior and everything else is getting homogenized.

When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

I think that all good, right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not, and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.

I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

Fashion is merely a saying: I belong to your world. I'm wearing the same uniform as your army, so don't shoot.

I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.

If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame.

If you're surrounded by idiots, you're the unpopular one and the odd one out because idiots don't like smart asses.

The industrial age brought compliance and compliance brought fear and fear brought us mediocrity.

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.

A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.

I had a lot of anger against the way things 'should be done' - conforming to social norms, ticking boxes to gain acceptance. Frustration at the pointlessness and predictability of smalltalk. Oh and a lot of anger about tea, which the British seem to use to avoid actually saying anything.

Custom is almost a second nature.

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.

May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

What makes this mentality dangerous is that when the team is held together by careerism and mindless partisanship, individual members are punished for thinking for themselves.

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.