Critical Pens

“The echo is heard immediately: but always as a ‘critique’…The work never produces an effect but only another’ critique ; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique…At bottom, however, everything remains as it was…The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action…But their critical pens never cease to flow, for the have lost control of them, and instead of directing them are directed by them.  It is precisely in this immoderation of its critical outpourings…that the modern personality betrays its weakness”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Untimely Meditations.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1983)
87

The English Malady

“Since our wealth has increas’d, we have ransak’d all the parts of the globe to bring together its whole stock of materials for riot, luxury, and to provoke excess…Is it any wonder, then, that the diseases which proceed from idleness and fullness of bread, should increase in proportion, and keep equal pace with those improvements of the matter and cause of disease?”

-George Cheyne, early advocate of vegetarianism, 1733

(via Stuffed & Starved. Raj Patel. Brooklyn NY: Melville House. 2007. pg 77.)