Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they ...weary themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Upon the whole I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all of those difficulties, which have hitherto amused phil...osophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have raised a dust, and then complain that we cannot see.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance.... When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures--finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding--we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact alone that both, like Chatham before them, were great war ministers, links their names inseparably. Beyond that, they sha...red many qualities in common: unquenchable vitality, restless energy, personal magnetism, and an inspiring power of oratory. They were alike also in their defects: opportunism, total lack of consideration for others, and a degree of egotism that can only be termed infantile. Lloyd George, however, whom Lord Haldane once called "an illiterate with an unbalanced mind," lacked both the versatility and the intellectual power of Churchill. Where Sir Winston found relaxation in Macauley or Gibbon, Lloyd George in his prime amused himself with cheap detective fiction. The latter, cast in an inferior mold, lacked also the personal courage of his younger colleague and successor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of m...easuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pagea...nt marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about ...us are dupes. But life is a sincerity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress of ...the character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »