“This is a brutal book – sensual, rude, coarse, and cruel. However, it is timely and well-written, even witty.”

The Furniture of a Woman's Mind (1727)

Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Some Mistakes of Moses (1879) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38802/38802-h/38802-h.htm Preface
Context: Too great praise challenges attention, and often brings to light a thousand faults that otherwise the general eye would never see. Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books, we would admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude, barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature's night. These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so palpably absurd, that every free unbiased soul is forced to raise the standard of revolt.

Variant: [I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Source: Sense and Sensibility

31 October 2002
Fully Ramblomatic

Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html (Winter 1998).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 1, Libanius to Priscus, Antioch March 380

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms