philistine

• “I should prefer to take a higher point of view, and apply the term philistine to people who are always seriously occupied with realities which are no realities; but as such a definition would be a transcendental one, and therefore not generally intelligible, it would hardly be in place in the present treatise, which aims at being popular.”

  The Wisdom of Life

• “Palestine itself did exist; it is the name granted to Israel by the Roman Empire after it quelled the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE; it was originally an insult to ancient jews living there as Palestine was from the greek/latin for of the term philistine to describe a mortal enemy of the jews; one who was constantly invading Israel in its early history, before its eventual eradication as a people.”

  On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with...

• “The peculiar characteristic of the philistine is a dull, dry kind of gravity, akin to that of animals.”

  The Wisdom of Life

• “I may remark, however, that a man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine — an expression at first peculiar to the”

  The Wisdom of Life

• “If the objection of the philistine were the same as the proletarian's, that art is a luxury, a waste of the energies of the community, which might better be employed in feeding the hungry and saving sinners, it would be more worthy of a hearing; and so he often represents it.”

  The Principles of Aesthetics

• “Artists, of course, are thrust unwillingly into the front line of today's cultural battle, prime targets for the kind of philistine paranoia that characterized the shameful McCarthy era.”

  The Huffington Post: Peter Clothier: Censorship: Coast to Coast

• “Neither do I know anything about the specific art works for which Gibson expresses his particular scorn (the usual kind of philistine skepticism), although I will say it's an especially cheap device to pick out just two of over one hundred works and implicitly hold them to be representative of the whole.”

  The State of Criticism

• “As sole motives they both seem pretty shallow to me, though, the extremes I label as "philistine" and "philosopher", Populism and Elitism in their worst senses.”

  More Aesthetics

• “By "philistine" do you mean someone from Philadelphia?”

  "Hey, Matt. Sure is a gorgeous day to get drunk and throw beanbags back and forth on the front sidewalk for 11 hours!"

• “Oh - one other thing ... what kind of philistine moron would ban The Bells of St. Trinian??!”

  ON THE BUBBLE WITH IAN RANKIN

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