Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow. – George Steiner
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his days work at Auschwitz in the morning. – George Steiner
Books — the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. – George Steiner
Those Romans who perpetrated the rape of the Sabines, for example, did not work themselves up for the deed by screening Debbie Does Dallas, and the monkish types who burned a million or so witches in the Middle Ages had almost certainly not come across Boobs and Buns or related periodicals. – Barbara Ehrenreich