#209 rst2latex uses quote environment for literal blocks
The rst2latex writer places literal blocks in a quote environment. This abuse of the quote environment means that quotes cannot be styled without affecting literal blocks, which is clearly a bug in the writer.
Proposed solution: wrap literal blocks in a custom environment.
Comment: the reason literal blocks are wrapped in the quote environment is simply to force indentation of literal blocks. **Separately** from this bug, I would urge the developers to rethink this decision and leave it up to users. Forcing indentation introduces many problems. E.g., as a result of this imposition, the rst2beamer writer output is horrible when literal blocks are included. Although I have proposed a solution above that allows continuation of the current practice, I believe that a better solution is not to wrap literal blocks in an extra environment, and leave indentation decisions up to users. (Who can e.g. set the indentation of the listings environment.)
With the recent addition to class handling of environments in the latex writer, independent styling of quotes and literal blocks becomes possible (although tricky).
Since 2017-09-22, the wrapping in quote environments is replaced by a global xleftmargin setting if "lstlistings" is used for literal blocks. This can be customized in preamble code or a custom style sheet.