"Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way in which it happened was that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigor, the savage virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But what makes one tribe—one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe—to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilization begins, because the beginning of civilization is a military advantage." Walter Bagehot   "Adaptation is, in part, just a property of neurons: Nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they 'habituate,' firing less to stimuli that they have become used to. It is change that contains vital information, not steady states. Human beings, however, take adaptation to cognitive extremes. We don't just habituate, we recalibrate. We create for ourselves a world of targets, and each time we hit one we replace it with another. After a string of successes we aim higher; after a massive setback, such as a broken neck, we aim lower. Instead of following Buddhist and Stoic advice to surrender attachments and let events happen, we surround ourselves with goals, hopes, and expectations, and then feel pleasure and pain in relation to our progress." Jonathan Haidt   "A neuron is simply a specialized cell, just like other cells in your body, but with some specializations that allow it to grow processes and propagate electrical signals. Like an ant, an individual brain cell just runs its local program its whole life, carrying electrical signals along its membrane, spitting out neurotransmitters when the time comes for it, and being spat upon by the neurotransmission of other cells. That's it. It lives in darkness. Each neuron spends its life embedded in a network of other cells, simply responding to signals. It doesn't know if it's involved in moving your eyes to read Shakespeare, or moving your hands to play Beethoven. It doesn't know about you. Although your goals, intentions, and abilities are completely dependent on the existence of these little neurons, they live on a smaller scale, with no awareness of the thing they have come together to build." David Eagleman   "I sat at the foot of an old oak, among whose branches the nightingale had just begun its vespers. 'Poor fool,' I said to myself, 'is it to guide the bullet to your breast or the child to your brood that you sing so loud and clear? Silence that untimely tune, perch yourself on your nest; tomorrow, perhaps, it will be empty.' But why address myself to you alone? All creation is equally mad. Behold those flies playing above the brook; the swallows and fish diminish their number every minute. These will become, in their turn, the prey of some tyrant of the air or water; and man for his amusement or his needs will kill their murderers. Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live, yet nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world." Emily Brontë   "The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, and have no idea of any counterpoising argument, they throw themselves precipitately into the principles to which they are inclined; nor have they any indulgence for those who entertain opposite sentiments." David Hume   "The Russians were building a society whose political, economic, and cultural values tested the most cherished of American assumptions. Moreover, the pilgrims to Moscow felt a sensation of being present at the dawn of a new age; as the old world died, another was being born before their very eyes. All of this invested the Soviet Union with a moral and psychological superiority which the United States appeared unable to match. 'For Russians,' Stuart Chase exclaimed in 1931, 'the world is exciting, stimulating, challenging, calling forth their interest and enthusiasm. The world for most Americans is dull and uninspiring, wracked with frightful economic insecurity.' While the West struggled helplessly with the depression, its people at the mercy of economic forces over which they had no control, the USSR strode purposefully into the future—bidding the rest of mankind to follow if they dared." Richard Pells   "Just as will and ethics collapse all binaries, I wish to collapse the binaries of natural life and death insofar as they are usually correlated with affirmation and negation by proposing that the death of the human species is the most life-affirming event that could liberate the natural world from oppression, and our death could be an act of affirmative ethics which would far exceed any localized acts of compassion because those acts will be bound by human contracts, social laws and the prevalent status of beings, things and their placement within knowledge." Patricia MacCormack   "Part of the problem in describing the role of ideology arises because ideology is highly fluid. Although one might hope that ideology would provide a clear guide to the intentions and actions of revolutionary leaders, in practice revolutionaries frequently shifted their policies in response to changing circumstances. And on many occasions, the twists and turns of the revolutionary struggle produced unforeseen results. Puritans sought to create a community of saints, but England became a community dominated by soldiers when the civil wars ceased. Robespierre rose as a defender of the French Republic, but created a virtual dictatorship." Jack Goldstone   "There are different kinds of dishonesty in the world. The most profitable kind is commercial fraud, and commercial fraud is parasitical on the overall health of the business sector on which it preys. It is much more difficult to be a fraudster in a society in which people do business only with relatives or where commerce is based on family networks going back for centuries. It is much easier to carry out a securities fraud in a market where dishonesty is the rare exception rather than the everyday rule." Dan Davies   "As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism 'one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism,' and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for 1984, the European nationalisms he was used to would somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily." Thomas Pynchon   "An honorable statesman, 'a truly magnanimous and courageous man,' should prefer 'affability' and 'high-mindedness' to 'useless and hateful peevishness.' But Cicero acknowledged that 'gentleness and clemency must be commended only as far as severity may also be employed for the sake of the commonwealth.' Cicero's honorable statesman is equally distant from the amoral self-assertion of the Nietzschean 'Over-man,' contemptuous as he is of his inferiors and of the deep aversion to the legitimate exercise of authority by the contemporary humanitarian. His standard is the 'honestum'—the fine, the noble, the honorable—at the service of civilized liberty. He resists the siren calls of both hardness—tyranny, cruelty, and an immoral power politics—and softness, which is tenderness, compassion, or generosity bereft of any deep understanding of human nature or of the 'inventiveness of wickedness,' as Edmund Burke once so suggestively called it." Daniel Mahoney   "The principle of the modern movement in morals and politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that, above all, merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority." John Stuart Mill   "Independence, declared David Ramsay in a memorable Fourth of July oration in 1778, would free Americans from that monarchical world where 'favor is the source of preferment,' and where 'he that can best please his superiors, by the low arts of fawning and adulation, is most likely to obtain favor.' The revolutionaries wanted to create a new republican world in which 'all offices lie open to men of merit, of whatever rank or condition.' They believed that 'even the reins of state may be held by the son of the poorest men, if possessed of abilities equal to the important station.' They were 'no more to look up for the blessings of government to hungry courtiers, or the needy dependents of British nobility'; but they had now to educate their 'own children for these exalted purposes.'" Gordon Wood   "Every tinhorn dictator in the world today has a bill of rights. It isn't the Bill of Rights that produces freedom. It's the structure of government that prevents anybody from seizing all the power." Antonin Scalia   "All economic endeavors involve the risks of waste, fraud, and abuse. But these problems are endemic to government for the simple reason that government spends other people's money, and nobody spends other people's money as carefully as they spend their own. The only way to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in a governmental activity is to eliminate that activity." Michael Cannon   "The purpose of a system is what it does." Stafford Beer   "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