“If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer bee considered 'dangerous' but set in place in their compartmental understandings.”
This appears not to be a Kerouac quote. It has not been found in any of Kerouac's published work.
Misattributed
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Jack Kerouac 266
American writer 1922–1969Related quotes

Misattributed
Source: This quote, frequently attributed to Aquinas, is actually a paraphrase of a passage (itself an elaborate paraphrase of Augustine) by Ptolemy of Lucca in his continuation of an unfinished work by Aquinas. The passage from Ptolemy reads: "Thus, Augustine says that a whore acts in the world as the bilge in a ship or the sewer in a palace: 'Remove the sewer, and you will fill the palace with a stench.' Similarly, concerning the bilge, he says: 'Take away whores from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy.'" (Ptolemy of Lucca and Thomas Aquinas, On the Government of Rulers, trans. James M. Blythe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 4. 14. 6). What Augustine actually wrote (in De ordine, 2. 4. 12) was simply: "Remove prostitutes from human affairs and you will unsettle everything on account of lusts." Only Book 1 and the first four chapters of Book 2 of On the Government of Rulers (De Regimine Principum) are by Aquinas. The rest of the work was written by Ptolemy. (It even mentions the coronation of Albert I of Hapsburg, an event that occurred in 1298, twenty-four years after Aquinas's death.) The quote comes from Book 4, which was definitely not written by Aquinas.
continuity (10) “Due Process”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)