“Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.”

“Masks are elaborate and everyone has one. It takes a while to get to know people. This doesn't make them mysterious, it makes them like everyone else.”

“All the bruised lives, searching hearts...Everyone wants a love story but few will risk what it takes to live one.”

“In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.”

“The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter.”

“Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.”