John Ruskin

"Our large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music, and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins, with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he maybe beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers."

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Source: John Ruskin (1872). “The Political Economy of Art: Being the Substance (with Additions) of Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester, July 10th and 13th, 1857”, p.124

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John Ruskin

John Ruskin

Art Critic, Writer

John Ruskin was a 19th-century art critic and social thinker known for his influential works on art, architecture, and society.

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