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"Sir, as much a cit as you take me for, I know the town and the world; and give me leave to say, that we merchants are a species of gentry that have grown into the world this last century, and are as honourable, and almost as useful, as you landed folks, that have always thought yourselves so much above us; for your trading, forsooth, is extended no farther than a load of hay or a fat ox. You are pleasant people, indeed, because you are generally bred up to be lazy; therefore, I warrant you, industry is dishonourable." Richard Steele   "The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes." Karl Marx   "What more excellent spectacle can there be to them that are lords and conquerors? To wound, slaughter and captivate them? To see their horses with the riders distressed? To see many of them which have received wounds neither to find surgery nor means of escape, some of them desperately to resist and presently to fall down? Lastly, to see the whole camp covered with weapons, armour, and dead bodies, and the ground dyed into purple with their enemies' blood?" Barnaby Barnes   "We have heard the cry of 'India for the Indians' which some of your philanthropists have raised in England; but you have only to go to the Zoological Gardens and open the doors of the cages, and you would very soon see what would be the result of putting that theory into practice. There would be a terrific fight among the animals, which would end in the tiger walking proudly over the dead bodies of the rest." Madhava Rao   "There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self—for other people—is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive." Henry James   "We no longer recognize that kind of liberalism which defines progress as the diminution of the state's role, an exclusive reliance on self-help, and the rejection of all public social and economic organizations; which identifies free trade with political freedom; and which will not let the state do anything in economic affairs because the state cannot do everything." Johannes Miquel   "From what I have said of the natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition: the Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life; they covet not magnificent houses, household-stuff etc. They live in a warm and fine climate and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing and this they seem to be fully sensible of, for many to whom we gave cloth etc to, left it carelessly upon the sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seemed to set no value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this, in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessaries of life and that they have no superfluities." James Cook   "Lenin fights institutions—and, naturally, the men who represent them—if necessary to their complete destruction. But he treats this as an inevitable, objective necessity which is humanly deplorable, but from which he cannot withdraw in the actually given concrete struggle. Gorky records Lenin's characteristic comments on listening to Beethoven's Appassionato: 'The Appassionato is the most beautiful thing I know; I could listen to it every day. What wonderful, almost superhuman music! I always think with pride—perhaps it is naive of me—what marvelous things human beings can do.' Then he screwed up his eyes, smiled, and added regretfully, 'But I can't listen to music too often. It works on my nerves so that I would rather talk foolishness and stroke the heads of people who live in this filthy hell and can still create such beauty. But now is not the time to stroke heads—you might get your hand bitten off. We must hit people mercilessly on the head, even when we are ideally against any violence between men. Oh! Our work is hellishly difficult.'" Georg Lukacs   "After a century of bourgeois languor, the adventurous life again claims its place in the world. I see the twentieth century as a century of great stature, after a century that has inaccurately been called stupid, and which was perhaps worse, mediocre. There is no place in such an era for those who think only of defending the quiet of their own garden, their own home, their own countryside, their own habits. The vital question for every nation is to enter into this epoch with a high and valid purpose. For times of conquest are never easy times. I do not say that they cannot be times of joy. Our duty is to save the joy of life from the wreck of pleasure." Emmanuel Mounier   "Our stakes are out of all proportion to those of any other power. To us defeat in a maritime war would mean disaster of almost unparallel magnitude in history. It might mean the destruction of our mercantile marine, stoppage of our manufactures, scarcity of food, invasion, disruption of empire. No other country runs the same risks in a war with us." William Waldegrave Palmer   "What concern is it of monks—men who have resolved to flee the world—what does it matter to them, who serves whom in the world, or under what name? Is not every man born to labour as a bird to flight? Does not almost every man serve either under the name of lord or serf? And is not he who is called a serf in the Lord, the Lord's freeman; and he who is called free, is he not Christ's serf? So if all men labour and serve, and the serf is a freeman of the Lord, and the freeman is a serf of Christ, what does it matter apart from pride–either to the world or to God—who is called a serf and who is called free?" Anselmo d'Aosta   "We have no more meat. Potatoes cannot be delivered because we are short four thousand cars every day. We have absolutely no fats left. The distress is so great that one stands before a perfect puzzle when one asks: How does North Berlin live and how does East Berlin live? As long as this puzzle cannot be solved, it is impossible to improve morale." Philipp Scheidemann   "The original 13 colonies had, as a rule, closer links with Europe than with each other, focusing on London and Paris rather than Boston and Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin has perhaps a better claim to be called a cosmopolitan than any other eighteenth-century figure. He was no slouch as a diplomat; indeed, he believed strongly in negotiations and mutually advantageous treaties between nations. Had the British War Office allowed him, George Washington might easily have been a professional soldier in George III's imperial army, pursuing a career in Europe or perhaps even India. America's ruling elite was always far more open toward, interested in, and knowledgeable about the world (especially Europe) than the French Canadians to the north and the Spanish- and Portuguese-Americans to the south." Paul Johnson   "Very few Americans, picking and choosing among the piles of white bread in a supermarket, have ever appreciated the social standing of white bread elsewhere in the world. To be able to afford white bread is a dream that awaits fulfillment for billions of the world's population. To afford it signifies that one enjoys all the comforts of life." Isabel Cary Lundberg   "Lenin was more hostile to the capitalist mode of distribution (market exchange) than to capitalism as a mode of production because the latter could assume the form of rationally controlled state capitalism, while the former was in his view the epitome of anarchy, uncontrollability, and dependence on blind, quasi-natural spontaneity. But the same is true of the founders of Marxism. To put it briefly, Marx conceived of freedom as conscious, rational control over economic and social forces. The main enemies of such freedom were the 'blind forces' of the market; freedom would only be realized by rational planning, by liberating people from objective dependence on things and alienated social forces. Hence he was inevitably more hostile to the market than to capitalism as a system of large-scale factory production: the capitalist factory was for him a great step forward to rational planning and organization, while the market was synonymous with anarchy and blind necessity." Andrzej Walicki   "The revolution is recruiting its troops, but the aging of the population, the softening up resulting from a long prosperity, the stupor following great defeats, the absence of two million prisoners, and the occupation of the greater part of the territory are all reasons why the new spirit can penetrate the masses only very slowly." Hubert Beuve-Mery   "The language of culture, enlightenment, great literature, philosophy, and science was French. Friedrich II himself considered German only good enough to speak to soldiers and horses, and wrote most of his correspondence in French (he could also speak and write in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian, as well as knowing Latin, Greek and Hebrew). He had his children taught in French, and only grudgingly allowed them a basic knowledge of German. He explained that German authors 'pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you find only at the end of an entire page the verb on which depends the meaning of the whole sentence,' something any student of German can sympathise with." Andie Gilmour   "We cannot allow Germany to use the channel as a hostile base. We have obligations to Belgium to prevent her being utilised and absorbed by Germany." Herbert Henry Asquith   "In law we draw a line between the killing of human animals and non-human ones, setting the latter apart as brutes. This was founded on a general belief that humans have immortal souls and brutes none. Nowadays more and more people are refusing to make this distinction. They may believe in The Life Everlasting and The Life to Come; but they make no distinction between Man and Brute, because some of them believe that brutes have souls, whilst others refuse to believe that the physical materializations and personifications of The Life Everlasting are themselves everlasting." George Bernard Shaw   "Once you begin to have the whole Enlightenment critique of the established church and the cult of the saints, you see the emergence of a cult of artists instead. So you have objects of veneration, whether it's a lock of John Keats's hair or a bit of wood supposedly from Shakespeare's mulberry tree." Jonathan Bate   "On the towpath we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, and looked aside; and then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, and an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed." Virginia Woolf   "Westerners have a lot of fat in their food; the further west one goes the more fat they eat. I say that Western meat-eaters are contemptible." Mao Zedong   "Lacking God within them, they rushed to embrace mammon. Lack of conscience and moral restraint, often concealed behind fancy phrases, became the norm. The pursuit of profit required extreme exertion of energy and effort: countless sleepless nights, excessive mental exertion, lack of means, frequent bargaining with one's conscience—all this could not help but devastate the nervous system of these young warriors, laying the foundation for an unstable nervous system and all types of neurasthenia." Pavel Kovalevskii   "I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?" Bruce Frederick Cummings   "To them a woman is more than a mere producer of wealth; she is an essential partner in the economy. Without a wife a man can not hunt; he has no hearth; he has nobody to build his house, gather fruits and vegetables and cook for him. So a group that loses a woman looks for a woman in return. The Pygmies extend the term 'brother' or 'sister' so that it can be applied to almost anyone of the same age group, however distantly related, and this means it is seldom impossible to find someone to exchange, and someone who is willing." Colin Turnbull   "It is to you fin-de-siecle young men that I address myself, a generation of playboys and pleasure-seekers, anaemic and neurasthenic, bereft of both will and courage; to you, the impotent and the tubercular, who lie about in your scrawny carcasses in café concerts and fashionable brasseries." Louis Bally   "Already there are practically only four great religions in the world. Within a century the minor religions may be gone; and possibly only three great faiths will remain. Those things which are already strong are growing stronger; those already weak are growing weaker and are ready to vanish away. Thus, as the earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at her disposal, and as the larger human groups absorb and assimilate the smaller, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought in each of its regions become more closely interwoven with those of every other. Finance, even more than politics, has now made the world one community, and finance is more closely interwoven with politics than ever before." James Bryce   "The Great War, except for its unexampled magnitude, was a type with which British statesmen and soldiers were traditionally familiar. Once every century since the end of the sixteenth we had been engaged in a struggle to uphold what was idealistically called the freedom of Europe and more prosaically the balance of power. In each case England was directly touched by the spur of self-preservation, by the danger of a naval rivalry more or less intense, and by the threat of hostile dominion in the most precious outwork of her security, the Low Countries. In each case too she occupied within her membership of loose and often jarring continental coalitions a peculiar, indeed a unique, position. Her territory was never violated, her command of the sea gave an almost embarrassing choice of objectives for her campaigns, and a semi-detached eclectic method of waging war. England in the past had never been the direct military instrument of the overthrow of the over-mastering power against which the coalition was arranged. She had been the inspirer and the reviver of such coalitions, she had been consistently 'the good milch cow' from which its members sucked subsidies inexhaustible in repute; she had in fact the tradition of waging continental war with the most lavish expenditure in money, and the greatest economy in human life." Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell