Recent quotes:
Scalia Is a Twitter Egg
these dissents aren’t even interesting as political commentary except maybe to the sort of cable news watcher who demands to see a cavalcade of dopes shouting the same warmed over talking points at him 24 hours a day. The only notable difference is that over the last few decades, the quality of his prose has descended from Ann Coulter to r/politics. Care about gay rights? Get out of the ivory tower and think about our precious children! Worried about executing the mentally disabled? Step off with the judicial activism. Immigration reform? Thanks Obama.
Mark Twain. “Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone,” he wrote in one letter to a friend, in a not-so-faint echo of the excesses of today’s Twitter users. He said a good library was one without a single Jane Austen book in it. And, comparing her to Edgar Allen Poe, whom he also disliked, he wrote: “I could read [Poe's] prose on salary, but not Jane’s. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”
Yikes. Scholars chalk this up to Austen’s love of convention offending the “American spirit,” but the Poe comment suggests a much deeper antipathy, doesn’t it?