December 2010
65 posts
What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities...
People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed and flourish, you must make it in the fashion: a phrase which I confess annoys me; for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two days trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, that they care very much for what they really do not care in the least.
- William Morris, in The Lesser Arts
A sickness of the heart that rejected with loathing the aimless solitary life of the well-to-do educated man of that time.
- William Morris, in News from Nowhere
