"[...] now we are going to be finished off by Fannie Mae.

I don’t even know what Fannie Mae is. Apparently, it’s not a bank and it’s not a building society, but it seems to have been buying mortgages and debts from various institutions. And then, one day, it appears to have woken up and thought: “Oops.” Quite how it was allowed to get in this mess, I’m not sure. Did nobody think it odd that a mysterious organisation was stomping around the world buying debt? Did nobody stop for a moment and wonder if perhaps Fannie Mae was a home for mentals? I mean, we’re talking here about an operation named after the human bottom. How did it sign its deals? With crayons?

Seriously, if I set up a business called Arse and went around buying outstanding loans on the nation’s never-never-land three-piece suites, I wouldn’t get very far before someone with a soothing voice and a corduroy jacket put me in a padded room for the rest of time."

Jeremy Clarkson in der Online-Times

"If our young people are toiling their way through their educational careers while reading less than ever before for their own pleasure or enlightenment, why be surprised? No one has ever taught them that books can be read for pleasure or enlightenment—or for any other purpose than to be exposed as the coded rationalization for the illegitimate powers of the ruling classes that they really are."
James Bowman: Is Stupid Making Us Google?

"The Internet owes its success to two pillars of human activity: masturbation and procrastination."
(Chris Wilson, slate.com)

so nahe an meiner Weltsicht wie nur irgend möglich, folgendes Zitat von Michail Bachtin:

"True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naïveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness."
[Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky.Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 122f.]

"La poésie est une vision du monde obtenue par un effort, quelquefois épuisant, de la volonté tendue, arcboutée. La poésie est volontaire. Elle n'est pas un abandon, une entrée libre et gratuite par les sens; elle ne se confond pas avec la sensualité, mais, s'opposant à elle, naissait, par exemple, le samedi, quand on sortait pour nettoyer les chambres, les fauteuils et les chaises de velours rouge, les glaces dorées et les tables d'acajou, dans le pré vert tout proche."

Jean Genet: Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. Paris: Gallimard 1976, p. 260

Carol Midgley mit einem großartigen Understatement in der Times (ganz unten, obwohl der Abschnitt über Schimpfwörter auch empfehlenswert ist) -- zitiert in toto:

My local paper reveals that Gordon Lorenz, who co-wrote the 1980 No1 hit There's No One Quite Like Grandma, sung by the St Winifred's School Choir, Stockport, has been fined £200 for twice failing to use the poop-scoop while out walking his dog, Bertie, in Llandudno. There's no punchline. I just thought you'd like to know.

"We are a process which has its genesis in roles, but grows into a characteristically human combination of self-consciousness and skill. The central self is not a substance but an effect, successful process. [...] We cannot strive for authenticity, for a real self. Like happiness, it seems to come en passant. We act in the world inevitably within a matrix of our own interests. We hope these will yield a genuine self, but no inevitability governs the process."

Richard A. Lanham: The Motives of Eloquence. Literary rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976, p.156

"... Democracy will have none of your classics, it hates allusions and quotations; it likes a writer to be 'clear and sensible' ... the new literature will be a thing of loud, bawling books, shrieking headlines, and slovenly grammar."

H.G. Wells: "The Literature of the Future" in: Pall Mall Gazette, 11.10. 1893

[zitiert nach: John Lawton: "Introduction" in: H.G.Wells: When The Sleeper Wakes. London: J.M. Dent, 1999. p.xxix]

-- Ich hoffe (und bin mir fast sicher), daß Wells' Implikation, die Demokratie selbst sei es, die große Kunst verhindere, Unsinn ist. Tatsächlich hege ich den Verdacht, daß die Schuld nicht bei der Demokratie liegt, sondern bei einem ausschließlich marktorientierten Kunstbetrieb, der glaubt, den Leuten alles einzigartige vorenthalten und einen tatsächlich in dieser Form nicht existenten allgemeinen Geschmack bedienen zu müssen. Davon abgesehen allerdings scheint mir Wells durchaus richtig zu liegen.

"Ich denke, daß es früher so war, daß die Leute selber ihre Sprache erfunden haben. Es tauchten neue Begriffe auf und die Schriftsteller mußten bloß zuhören und hatten ihr Rohmaterial, wenn sie wollten; heute hingegen erfinden ein paar Werbeleute ein paar Catchphrases und das war's dann. Die Leute wissen ja nichtmal mehr, wie die Dinge heißen. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, wie das mittelfristig besser werden soll."

Hans Wilhelm Volkner im Interview mit der Zeitschrift Das Echo, 17.8.1998
[zitiert nach Jess A. Hawkes: Corporate Linguistics and the Loss of Language. Connecticut University Press: 2005, p. 122f.]

"Le laudi - disse - che il signor Magnifico ed io avemo date alle donne, ed ancora molte altre, erano notissime, però sono state superflue. Chi non sa che senza le donne sentir non si po contento o satisfazione alcuna in tutta questa nostra vita, la quale senza esse saria rustica e priva d'ogni dolcezza, e più aspera che dell'alpestre fiere? Chi non sa che le donne sole levano de' nostri cori tutti li vili e bassi pensieri, gli affanni, le miserie e quelle turbide tristezze che così spesso loro sono compagne?"
B. Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, III, 51.

Scheint, als würde jeder Versuch zu widersprechen vergeblich sein, nicht?