Gallimaufry Quotes

“Yiddish mensch becomes a clear approbative, a man of honor and integrity, but it also means a real, a genuine person, someone who is even possibly flawed but has known travail, yet has come through not only”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“systematically murderous totalitarian system of all, conspired in their own death, was yet a fourth savant-idiot. The classic American savant-idiot, surely, was Susan Sontag. This is the Susan Sontag who called white civilization “the cancer of human history”;”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“the so-called sexual revolution, for example, “rather a prim term for the lurid carnival that actually took place.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“the criterion a wealthy character sets for buying art is “that a picture should repel his sense and intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“no contemporary painting could have any serious standing without a critical theory certifying and explaining it. Twenty-five years from”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“Susan Sontag as “just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“the Soviet experiment as “an absurd horror film stretching over 70 years.” Government-organized famine, hideous show trials, brutal gulags, mass murder, life in the Soviet Union made the plagues that fell upon Egypt seem a week in the Catskills.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“The devil, of course, was totalitarianism, in particular fascism and Communism, which promised its adherents heaven and brought them unmitigated hell.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“so many artists and scientists, the youthful Zweig found school a great bore.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“surely better to be a nation than to be mistreated by one.” The Jews “are forced to be a ‘nation’ by the nationalism of the others,”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“America, which he never visited, he called “that monstrous prison of freedom . . . where the most repulsive of tyrants, the populace, holds vulgar sway” and “all men are equal—equal dolts”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“Alongside the self-obsession they display and the victimhood they claim, current-day students often shout down speakers whose views they don’t approve,”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“Each university president has merely kept the pot boiling without noticing what wretched fare was cooking inside it. None has prevented or even slowed any of the continuing rot of the humanities and social sciences within their institution, nor even thought to do so.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“When I say that democracy has no place in the university, I mean that the university is, or at any rate was and ought still to be, a hierarchical institution, as befits an elite enterprise. The hierarchy is based upon scholarly and scientific accomplishment. The accomplishment makes for authority.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

“there is no faculty so weak as the English faculty,” which is “the common catch-all for aspirants to the birch who are too lazy or too feeble in intelligence to acquire any sort of exact knowledge, and the professional incompetence of its typical ornament is matched only by his hollow cocksureness.” In a passing reference to Emory University he mentions “the students there incarcerated.”
― Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits