Presumably Kant and Aristotle are not claiming that, if we are to love or befriend someone, this person must be who we are, which is a rather narcissistic way of being our equals.

Much the opposite: there is no sentiment that renders us more stonily impervious to the suffering of humanity writ large, more myopically fixated on one person at the expense of all the rest.

Maybe everyone deserves love—but only some of us get it. Is there any arrangement deafer to the usual demands of morality?

There is nothing more foreign to justice than love; it is more alien than even injustice.

The best sex, probably, was the sex people had when they really believed they would go to hell for it—but craved it so badly that they had it anyway.

A curious consequence of this view is that the more repressive and puritanical a culture, the more considerable its erotic potential.

In Erotism, published in 1957, the philosopher Georges Bataille suggests that eroticism is a question of the violation of social prohibitions. If everything is permitted, then nothing is perverted.

If “love requires scandal,” and nothing scandalizes us any longer, how is the novelist to cast lovers beyond the bounds of respectability, which is to say, how is the novelist to render lovers at all?

(More likely, the survey evidences our enduring tendency to regard whichever moment we are living through as the worst one.)