Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds--a sacrifice to the vanity of ageing adolescents.... I...n 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion--or a new form of Christianity--based on faith in financial mi...racles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentia...lly in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is one principal and as it were radical distinction between different minds, in respect of philosophy and the sciences; whic...h is this: that some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things, others to mark their resemblances. The steady and acute mind can fix its contemplations and dwell and fasten on the subtlest distinctions: the lofty and discursive mind recognises and puts together the finest and most general resemblances. Both kinds however easily err in excess, by catching the one at gradations, the other at shadows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost ...in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, ...but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack noth...ing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »