"Forcing actors to bargain and contend and collaborate slows precipitous change by requiring multiple checkpoints, but it also, just as importantly, ensures change by requiring constant negotiations between shifting constellations of actors. To break deadlock, actors need to make new arguments, try new ideas, recruit new supporters, find new allies, and take new steps to mollify old allies. The search for sweeteners and workarounds and allies rewards innovation and ingenuity. Compromise, in Madison's scheme, is thus a positive dynamic force, not merely a negative restraining force." Jonathan Rauch   "Feelings can only be expressed, not discussed or argued about. This cannot result in mutual understanding but only in mute acceptance of whatever people wish to say about themselves, or in violent confrontation. The same is true of political discourse. Ideology has caused a great deal of suffering, to be sure, particularly in political systems where ideologies were imposed by force. But without any ideology political debate becomes incoherent, and politicians appeal to sentiments instead of ideas. And this can easily result in authoritarianism, for, again, you cannot argue with feelings. Those who try are denounced not for being wrong but for being unfeeling, uncaring, and thus bad people who don't deserve to be heard." Ian Buruma   "Cicero considered it an advantage that the Roman constitution's balance between the consuls, the Senate, and the popular assemblies had evolved over time. He noted that Cato the Elder 'used to say that no genius of such magnitude had ever existed that he could be sure of overlooking nothing; and that no collection of able people at a single point of time could have sufficient foresight to take account of everything; there had to be practical experience over a long period of history.'" Carl Richard   "The function of criticism is not to make the poet in question the contemporary of the reader, but to make the reader for the time being a contemporary of the poet. To criticize is not merely or primarily to analyze one's own impression of a work of art, as the impressionistic critics aver, but to ascertain, if possible, the author's intention, and to gauge and measure the forces and tendencies of his time." Elmer Edgar Stoll   "Traditional societies, in which children are reared much as our ancestors were, experience very little intramural crime. The few outlaws in those communities tend to be people whose innate temperaments made them extraordinarily difficult to socialize, people we would now call psychopaths. We were designed by natural selection to be able to develop a conscience, feelings of empathy and altruism, to become responsible and to carry our share of the load in the group effort for survival. Like our language instinct, these socialization proclivities require to be elicited, shaped, and reinforced beginning in early childhood. In the extended-family milieu of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with the help of numerous adults and the older children, we can suppose that this process was usually successful. When a modern young couple, inexperienced and untrained, attempt this most demanding of human responsibilities on their own, we can expect the failure rate to be higher. When a single mother, often immature and poorly socialized herself and usually in straightened circumstances, takes on this responsibility, the failure rate is very high indeed." David Lykken   "In its strictest sense, to be distracted means to be perplexed, confused, bewildered; a distracted person is out of touch with the person they used to be; a person 'beside themselves,' who has to be reminded; a person drawn asunder, pushed away, pulled apart, turned aside; a person 'depersonalized,' who's lost their grip, their footing, their mind." Joshua Cohen   "There are languages where the word 'dumb' is translatable only by 'aggressive' words: 'cretin,' 'stupid,' 'imbecilic,' etc. As though being dumb were something exceptional, a shortcoming, an abnormality, and not our 'inherent human condition.'" Milan Kundera   "Men get into more fist fights than women. They play more violent video games and watch more violent movies. They're more likely to be hospitalized for punching walls. They're more likely to fantasize about killing another person. They're more likely to actually kill another person. And they're more likely to kill themselves. For low-level violence—a slap or a shove—the gender gap is surprisingly small. But as we move up the scale, from minor to more extreme forms of violence, the gap grows larger with every step. By the time we arrive at the most extreme form of one-on-one violence—homicide—men are virtually the sole perpetrators. Globally, more than 90 percent of homicides are committed by men. Most victims are men as well: around 70 percent. Interestingly, the figures for chimpanzees are nearly identical; one chimpicide study found that 92 percent of killers were males and 73 percent of victims." Steve Stewart-Williams   "The percentage of infant deaths due to infanticide varied widely, and rose as high as 37% in a population of mountain gorillas, 44% in chacma baboons, 47% in blue monkeys, and a remarkable 71% in red howler monkeys. In 2014, the behavioral ecologists Dieter Lukas and Elise Huchard surveyed 260 species of mammals studied in the wild and reported that infanticide had been found in almost half of them, mainly in species where males have something to gain from the killing. It is usually a selfish reproductive strategy used by males to bring females into breeding condition as soon as possible. With regard to primates, among 89 wild species, they found infanticide in 60 (67%), including chimpanzees and gorillas." Richard Wrangham   "Natural selection is the process whereby certain genes gain representation in the following generations superior to that of other genes located at the same chromosome positions. When new sex cells are manufactured in each generation, the winning genes are pulled apart and reassembled to manufacture new organisms that, on the average, contain a higher proportion of the same genes. But the individual organism is only their vehicle, part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread them with the least possible biochemical perturbation. Samuel Butler's famous aphorism, that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg, has been modernized: the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA." Edward Osborne Wilson   "There is appearance, what things seem to be superficially. And then there is their real nature. These sometimes pull apart, and this is why science, which is in the business of discovering the essential nature of things, can tell us surprising things, such as that hummingbirds, ostriches, and falcons, however different they appear, are all birds—but bats, which look like birds, are not. We rely on these discoveries in everyday life. When you go to a doctor with a rash, you'll be unsatisfied if you're told that it looks like sunburn; you want to know that it really is—and this is what procedures such as blood tests and biopsies are for." Paul Bloom   "Between the early 1950s and the late 1990s, according to estimates by the United Nations Population Division, the planetary expectation of life at birth jumped from under forty-seven years to sixty-five years. For low income regions, the leap was even more dramatic. This radical drop in mortality is entirely responsible for the increase in human numbers over the course of the twentieth century: The 'population explosion,' in other words, was really a 'health explosion.'" Nicholas Eberstadt   "Ask a journalist what a jackboot is, and you will find that he does not know. Yet he goes on talking about jackboots." Eric Blair   "Nick, who soaks himself in illusion, is clear-sighted about Daisy. It is her voice, he suspects, that is captivating. He refers to her 'deathless song'—the association with the Sirens, eternally enchanting but deadly for those who are seduced. Gatsby describes the voice as 'full of money,' with Daisy as the king's daughter, the princess lounging inaccessibly high in her castle. Nick speculates: 'I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed.' At the hub of this story is the desperate need for a dream that is real, or at least not so overblown as to be obviously improbable. Mind, Daisy's 'feverish warmth' weeps over a wardrobe full of shirts." John Carroll   "In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely-different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the workerbees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience." Charles Darwin   "Abstract pity invites cheap sentiment, Manichean absolutism, and confounds any possibility for genuine political freedom. Writes Arendt: 'Since the days of the French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their "principles," or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution as such.' Virtue without limits is evil and poverty lends itself all too readily to this construction of virtue. Opponents are turned out as traitors. Plurality gives way to 'massification.' Hypocrites must be hunted down and crushed. The Reign of Terror and the Reign of Virtue are one." Jean Bethke Elshtain   "Between 1793 and 1794 some 30,000 were killed in the 'official' Terror alone and tens of thousands imprisoned without trial in over-crowded, stinking gaols. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the représentant in the rebellious west, turned the Loire into a 'national bathtub,' drowning prisoners in batches of hundreds at Nantes and reporting to Paris: 'We shall turn France into a cemetery rather than fail in her regeneration.' Even though the Terror did not last long, its legacy was the reintroduction of the spirit of religious warfare to a country and a continent which had virtually forgotten it. Both politics and war became black-and-white struggles between good and evil, with compromise or negotiation ruled out of court." David Gordon Wright   "A nation is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors." Karl Deutsch   "In February 1790, caught up in an obscure argument over a legal issue that had resulted in an accusation of bad faith, he produced a pamphlet lambasting the 'friends of despotism and aristocracy' who 'apply themselves with indefatigable confidence to renewing their fatal plots,' and connecting his own actions to a context in which 'at the heart of this capital the horrible secret of the most cowardly and the most extravagant conspiracy that venality and tyranny has ever woven against the patrie and liberty begins to emerge.' At the end of that year he responded to praise from the patriots of Avignon, in the context of their violent struggle for integration into the patrie, by calling their language 'the most flattering prize of my attachment to their cause and that of humanity.' In defending them, 'it is justice, it is liberty, it is my patrie, it is myself that I have defended.' After a further page of such effusion, he concluded that 'the happiness of the people of Avignon would be proportional to their magnanimity, if my power equaled my zeal for their interests, and the tender veneration that I have pledged to them.' Whatever else Robespierre may be said to be doing in such passages, he is certainly fashioning a self in which this particularly melodramatic form of sentimental identification is to the fore." David Andress   "I think it's very difficult and it requires a tremendous amount of spiritual integrity and discipline to not be a narcissist in a culture that encourages it every step of the way." Alan Ball