Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
Sabbath. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.
—Thomas M. Disch (b. 1940)