"Good taste is not essential, and it is often a brake on energy."

-Fairfield Porter, Art in its Own Terms

"A magnificent temple is a laudable monument of national taste and religion, and the enthusiast who entered the dome of St. Sophia, might be tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!"

-Sir Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall

"Every law, either human or divine, was trampled under foot, and as long as the party was succesful, its deluded followers appeared careless of private distress or public calamity."

-Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

On art scholarship and movements: 

"It is the economic pressure on scholarship exerted by the universities that lead to the naming of movements in the arts, and once a movement is named, it is justified by words, and the literature around it gives it critical validity."

On the sculpture of Giacometti: 

"The roughness of the modeling can be thought of as the beating anything takes in an assertion of its existence against the vastness of the universe. It is its dignity, its payment for existence against the weight of indifferent adversity. The complications of the surface are, as it were, the scars of battles of limited assertion."

-Fairfield Porter, Art in its Own Terms