"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