Kitsch ... is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and Afr...ican masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shall we never have done with that cliché, so stupid that it could only be human, about the sympathy of animals for man when he i...s unhappy? Animals love happiness almost as much as we do. A fit of crying disturbs them, they'll sometimes imitate sobbing, and for a moment they'll reflect our sadness. But they flee unhappiness as they flee fever, and I believe that in the long run they are capable of boycotting it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment. ... The explorer seeks the... undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. ... If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates. ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's.... Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to "be" college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, t...hey can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Punks in their silly leather jackets are a cliché. I have never liked the term and have never discussed it. I just got on with it... and got out of it when it became a competition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Ce...rtainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor- mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and cliché-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, Ignorance bringing them nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »