"We define ourselves, in part, by the discriminations we make. The value of what we love is enriched by our understanding of what we dislike"
About this Quote
Identity isn’t built only from what we embrace; it’s sharpened by what we refuse. David Ansen’s line has the cool, critic’s confidence of someone who has watched taste get mistaken for personality. “Discriminations” lands with deliberate double meaning: it nods to aesthetic discernment (the ability to tell the profound from the merely popular) while also flirting with the moral hazard of exclusion. The sentence dares you to admit that your preferences aren’t innocent. They’re boundary-making tools.
The subtext is that love, by itself, is too soft to describe a self. Anyone can say they “love movies,” “love art,” “love people.” What makes a worldview legible is the friction: the genres you can’t stand, the behaviors you won’t excuse, the ideas you reject on principle. Ansen frames dislike not as petty negativity but as an organizing intelligence. The person who knows what they dislike is harder to market to, harder to flatter, harder to herd.
Contextually, it reads like the kind of maxim born from a culture of omnivorous consumption where taste has been flattened into algorithms and “liking everything” passes for openness. Ansen pushes back: distinctions are not just snobbery; they are how meaning accrues. Loving something without understanding its opposite can be mere appetite. Loving it with contrast becomes commitment - a choice, not a reflex.
The subtext is that love, by itself, is too soft to describe a self. Anyone can say they “love movies,” “love art,” “love people.” What makes a worldview legible is the friction: the genres you can’t stand, the behaviors you won’t excuse, the ideas you reject on principle. Ansen frames dislike not as petty negativity but as an organizing intelligence. The person who knows what they dislike is harder to market to, harder to flatter, harder to herd.
Contextually, it reads like the kind of maxim born from a culture of omnivorous consumption where taste has been flattened into algorithms and “liking everything” passes for openness. Ansen pushes back: distinctions are not just snobbery; they are how meaning accrues. Loving something without understanding its opposite can be mere appetite. Loving it with contrast becomes commitment - a choice, not a reflex.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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