"As long as one stops oneself taking anything to be true that is not true and sticks to the right order so as to deduce one thing from another, there can be nothing so remote that one cannot eventually reach it, nor so hidden that one cannot discover it." René Descartes   "He clearly saw that the new world he was so actively helping to build was horrifyingly unlike the original concept. Life was deviating from the blueprints, but the blueprints had been declared sacrosanct and it was forbidden to compare them with what was actually coming into being. Determinist theory had naturally given birth to unheard-of practitioners who boldly outlawed any study of real life: Why undermine the system and sow unnecessary doubt if history was in any case speeding us to the appointed destination? When the high priests are bound together by such a bond, renegades can expect no mercy. Bukharin was not a renegade, but he already felt how inevitable it was that he would be cast into the pit because of his doubts and the bitter need which one day would drive him to speak out and call things by their real name." Nadezhda Mandelstam   "The Lord of the Rings is not a book that teaches you something. It's a book that helps you discover who you are, which is something else. Above all, Tolkien has given me this understanding that power is not a conquest but an enemy, a problem that you must keep under control, on a leash." Giorgia Meloni   "He always performed well among teachers and university professors. Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS. Thus, the four Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing battalions which were the spearhead of Hitler's 'final solution' in Eastern Europe contained an unusually high proportion of university graduates among the officers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded 'D' Battalion, for instance, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence." Paul Johnson   "La Baumelle went to jail, thanks partly to Voltaire, whose works he had ventured to criticize. Fréron, a conservative and Catholic journalist, was called by Voltaire, in a single work, a scribbler, scoundrel, toad, lizard, snake, spider, viper's tongue, crooked mind, heart of filth, doer of evil, rascal, impudent person, cowardly knave, spy, and hound. He found his journal gagged, his income halved and his career ruined by the concerted attacks of the philosophers. To silence him, at least two of these philosophers, Marmontel and d'Alembert, appealed to the censors whose very existence the enlightened thinkers are supposed to have abhorred." Robert Roswell Palmer   "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams   "There is something alarmingly desperate in intellectuals who have no religious attachment, faith or loyalty proper and who insist on the irreplaceable educational and moral role of religion in our world and deplore its fragility, to which they themselves eminently bear witness. I do not blame them either for being irreligious or for asserting the crucial value of religious experience; I simply cannot persuade myself that their work might produce changes they believe desirable, because to spread faith, faith is needed and not an intellectual assertion of the social utility of faith." Leszek Kolakowski   "Many pacifists and others who have an ethical—and really admirable—attitude toward life are somewhat boring. Their point of view, their writing and conversation are wholly sympathetic but also a little on the dull side. Intellectually, their ideas lack subtlety and logical structure. Ethically, they are too consistent; they don't sense the tragedy of life, the incredible difficulty of actually putting into practice an ethical concept. They have not succumbed to temptation because they have never been tempted; they are good simply because it has never occurred to them to be bad. They are, in a word, unworldly." Dwight MacDonald   "Russian literary classics frequently describe dreamers or revolutionaries who disdain practical work. Very rarely do they offer sympathetic portraits of businessmen. The eponymous hero of Ivan Goncharov's brilliant comic novel Oblomov (1859) spends all his time daydreaming—it takes him over a hundred delightful pages to get out of bed—and could not be more unlike his practical boyhood friend Stolz, who succeeds in almost everything except changing Oblomov's ways. As his name indicates, Stolz is not ethnically Russian. Doing things, it seems, is German." Gary Saul Morson   "Thomas Kuhn said that scientists are good at finding evidence that fits their models and good at ignoring evidence that doesn't fit. Even when a huge pile of conflicting evidence accumulates, the model endures. Scientists find ways to discredit what Kuhn called 'discrepant data.' It's not until they die that a new model is spread by a new generation that has grown up with the discrepancies. Then the cycle starts over, as the new orthodoxy is vehemently defended from conflicting evidence." Loretta Breuning   "A commitment to liberty requires a capacity for self-doubt—a willingness to entertain arguments about your own beliefs, as well as respect for the right to believe differently. Censors and other aspiring autocrats are not inclined to question their own absolute righteousness; they much prefer declaration to argument." Wendy Kaminer   "Consensus does not constitute truth. Indeed every scientific theory, no matter how widely accepted or how often confirmed by experiment, always hangs by a thread. Only one prediction made by the theory that turns out not to be true is needed to negate it in part or in whole." John Steele Gordon   "How do things stand now with our politics? With our opinion, that is, on how the state should be organized? I say 'our' because in political matters it is of course presumptuous and wrong to speak in the first person singular. Here one never stands alone. There is no political originality. One takes sides, and one may only say, 'We believe,' or 'I, too, believe.' This stamps the political sphere, therefore, as inferior, because it is a nonpersonal sphere; in it opinions prevail, and opinions do not confer rank. Political opinions lie on the street: Pick one up and attach yourself to it, and to many, possibly to yourself, too, you will seem more respectable than before, but this is based on illusion." Thomas Mann   "Owls can rotate their heads 270 degrees. I do not want to recommend that anyone attempt to try and do just that. However, we can learn, look around us, perceive one another and examine things more closely—this is something that we are quite capable of." Frank-Walter Steinmeier   "No thought could be further from his mind than the feasibility of 'unmasking' Homer to discover, for example, hidden narratives of oppression. For another thing—one not unrelated to the first—his literary perspective is utterly contrary to the currently faddish idea of curricular 'representation,' that is, that one's own personal 'lived experience' has to be represented in the literature assigned in academic work, which is to say, literature by demographics and tribal identity. Melanchthon would instead have us focus on what is common in our human experience and on how literature can help to shape our minds and habits in accordance with virtuous means and ends in our common life." Eric Hutchinson   "Feelings happen when emotions bubble to the surface so that we become aware of them. When we are conscious of our emotions, we are able to express them in words and make others aware of them: they see emotions in our face, but they get the feelings from our mouth. We say we are 'happy' and people believe us, unless of course they can see for themselves that we're not." Frans de Waal   "Hume only used the word 'bundle' to describe the self once, but the word stuck and many now use the term 'bundle theories' to describe a family of positions similar to Hume's. One reason it stuck is that a 'bundle' sounds chaotic and disorganized and so it conveys a sense of the idea's implausibility that critics exploited. The same could be said of Hume's phrase 'nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions,' but 'bundle' is pithier. One of Hume's contemporaries, Thomas Reid, critically attributed to him the view that 'what we call the mind, is only a bundle of thoughts, passions and emotions, without any subject.' The key word here is 'only.' For many, it just seems incredible that we can be nothing more than a mere bundle of perceptions. But there is nothing 'mere' about it. The universe is no less incredible because it is 'only' a vast collection of atoms. Indeed, perhaps it is more so. Nor are we any less remarkable because we are made up of our thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, and sensations." Julian Baggini   "A new fad in literary criticism offers the possibility of saying something new without the need for original thought. And so we get feminist readings of Shakespeare, psychological readings, sociological readings, and so on. But even by the standards of those particular fads, Derrida's 'deconstruction' offered extraordinary new opportunities. The infinite play of meaning meant that a great classic could hint at all kinds of things that had never been seen in it before. A favorite tactic was to make a text say the opposite of what it seemed to say on the surface. By loosening critical commentary from the constraints of what the author actually said, academic critics who lacked originality could seem to achieve some semblance of it. This is surely why Derrida became at this time the most influential figure in literary studies in the English-speaking world." John Martin Ellis   "To be sure, we no longer believe here that nature has divided the human race, like horses, into three or four categories, and that one of these categories is also doomed to work much and eat little. We have been told so much about the benefits of business and trade that a nobleman is now beginning to look upon a banker and a merchant, as long as they are very rich, almost as his equals." Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat   "Postmodernists have achieved the ability to write about their thoughts in a uniquely impenetrable manner. Their neo-baroque prose style with its inner clauses, bracketed syllables, metaphors and metonyms, verbal pirouettes, curlicues and figures is not a mere epiphenomenon; rather, it is a mocking rejoinder to anyone who would try to write simple intelligible sentences in the modernist tradition." Marvin Harris