“It is not by chance that the European aristocracy went into business once heroes and warriors went out of style.”

“Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.”

“The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are … For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it’s only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we’re more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcize imitation.”