"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. "
— Susan Sontag

""It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.""
— Erich Fromm

"The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things."
— Jean de La Bruyère

"It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character."
— Michelle Richmond

"The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."
— Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)

"Historically, we thus find ourselves faced with a sort of great divide in knowing how to be in the world; on the one hand, there is the original nomad for whom the journey, the being's trajectory, are dominant. On the other, there is the sedentary man for whom subject and object prevail, movement towards the immovable, the inert, characterizing the sedentary urban 'civilian' in contrast to the 'warrior' nomad."
— Paul Virilio