You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without bei — Roger Kimball

"Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that liberated them from all restraints and allowed them to experience every impulse as a divine command. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities. Podhoretz added, It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an expanded consciousness, the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery."

"Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum expresses the fate of a culture’s dignity, its attitude toward its animating values."

"The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions."

"Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life."

"History,” Bagehot wrote, “is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”"

"As with most revolutions, the countercultures call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of political correctness, with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the Filthy Speech Movement} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues."