Quotations

«Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.»

«Those who cannot remember the past will spend a lot of time looking for their cars in mall parking lots.»

«This is a deeply uncanny and very troubling development, it exists, and it wants to take us back. It wants to take us, I mean, way back. I mean sure, they want to go back before the 70?s and the 60?s to the 50?s, no doubt about that. They also want to go back before the New Deal to the 20?s, well they also want to go back before the Progressive Era to the Gilded Age. Well, not quite, they also want to go back before the Emancipation Proclamation to the days of slavery, not even, what they want to do is take us back to a moment prior to the Enlightenment; they want to take us back to a moment when faith registered more than reason. They want to take us back to an imaginary age of absolute moral clarity, when good was good and evil was evil and everyone could see the difference. They want to take us back to an imaginary Manichean age when you?re either with us or against us, which means you either are us or we?ll exterminate you because we can only tolerate ourselves, we can only tolerate those who share our values. If this movement were to be given a name, I think it would most appropriate to call it Christo-Fascism, and if anyone objects to my using the word fascism, because it seems so redolent of the Axis powers, and after all we valiantly defeated fascism once, well understand this about fascism, when it arrives it never shows up in the discarded costume of some other country, and when fascism comes here, its not going to be wearing a toothbrush mustache with a luger in his belt and go goose-stepping around the mall, because that?s Germany. And its precisely characteristic of fascism, that it seems absolutely, totally expressive of the homeland, it seems completely familiar, it?s when 150% America puts a flag on it?s lapel and a cross around it?s neck and a real folksy way a talkin?, but just because it?s red, white and blue, doesn?t mean it?s American.»

«A suburban mall turned vertical.»

«In the past, those who had ideas they wished to communicate to the public had the unquestioned right to disseminate those ideas in an open marketplace. called a mall, we should not abridge that right.»

«Every town has the same two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to.»

«A father . . . knows exactly what those boys at the mall have in their depraved little minds because he once owned such a depraved little mind himself. In fact, if he thinks enough about the plans that he used to have for young girls, the father not only will support his wife in keeping their daughter home but he might even run over to the mall and have a few of those boys arrested.»

«I want to shake off the dust of this one-horse town. I want to explore the world. I want to watch TV in a different time zone. I want to visit strange, exotic malls...I want to live, Marge! Won't you let me live?»

«Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.»

«Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.»