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"His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all 'nice and smiling.' While 'repressive in a certain liberal sense,' he wrote, Mao's China was 'endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.' Why, China showed that 'the whole theory about what an 'open society' is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of 'democracy'—and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects.'" Bruce Bawer   "The concept of 'truth' as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness—the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster." Bertrand Russell   "The value we attach to water is not determined by the infinite utility ot the single glass of water needed to save us from perishing of thirst; it is determined by the utility of the last dose used to bathe ourselves or to sprinkle the flowers." Wilhelm Röpke   "It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?" Andrew Anthony   "Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad   "Most 18th-century political thinkers were dubious that large states could be republics. Shaped by classic republican ideas, they believed that republics had to be grounded in the virtus of their citizens. Only a stern political education would train citizens to overcome their private egotistic passions and act in the name of Reason, for the public good. Such education was problematic in large states, the political thinkers believed. The great revolutions in America and France proved them wrong. It was passion, not its overcoming, that sustained republics: Love of one's country—patriotism—would transcend egotism and make citizens jealous guardians of their nation's interests, as well as of the liberties of their fellow citizens." Gadi Taub   "Our conscious mind seems to be rather like the public relations department of a large, complex and turbulent firm, dominated by a secretive and divided management, which never allows the PR officer to be privy to its secrets." Ernest Gellner   "Islam is not a nation, but many Muslims express a kind of religious nationalism, and the leaders of radical Islam, including al Qaeda, do seek to establish a theocratic nation or confederation of nations that would encompass a wide swath of the Middle East and beyond. Like national movements elsewhere, Islamists have a yearning for respect, including self-respect, and a desire for honor. Their national identity has been molded in defiance against stronger and often oppressive outside powers, and also by memories of ancient superiority over those same powers. China had its 'century of humiliation.' Islamists have more than a century of humiliation to look back on, a humiliation of which Israel has become the living symbol, which is partly why even Muslims who are neither radical nor fundamentalist proffer their sympathy and even their support to violent extremists who can turn the tables on the dominant liberal West, and particularly on a dominant America which implanted and still feeds the Israeli cancer in their midst." Robert Kagan   "We have failed to restore Russia to sanity by force. I believe we can save her by trade. Commerce has a sobering influence in its operations. The simple sums in addition and subtraction which it inculcates soon dispose of wild theories." David Lloyd George   "The store the English set by wealth is such that when they want to express their admiration for anyone, they say he's worth a great deal of money and they even stipulate the sum." Joseph Fievee   "He joined zeal for revolution with a social ideal for which the countryside was the necessary locale. His classic Utopia, News from Nowhere, was significantly subtitled An Epoch of Rest. In it were juxtaposed the 'hurried and discontented humanity' of late-Victorian England and the relaxed, peaceful inhabitants of his future pastoral world after the revolution. His Utopia is a world without cities and without change. Morris embraced revolution—a short, distinct time for radical change—in order to end, once and for all, the ceaseless, unsettling change that disturbed him. An apparent paradox, but not when we appreciate the power of the desire to escape from change and the growing appeal of 'rest' as a social ideal to so many in the English middle classes, whether they professed conservatism or radicalism." Morton Wiener   "Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto studfarm." Knut Hamsun   "It is the careful adjustment by which the rights of individuals and the state are reconciled with one another to allow the greatest possible development of all and of each in harmony and peace. It is the triumph of the effort to substitute right for might, and the repression of law for the wild struggles of barbarism. Civil liberty, as now known, is not a logical or rational deduction at all; it is the result of centuries of experience which have cost the human race an untold expenditure of blood and labor. As the result we have a series of institutions, traditions, and positive restraints upon the governing power. These things, however, would not in themselves suffice. We have also large communities which have inherited the love of civil liberty and the experience of it—communities which have imperceptibly imbibed the conception of civil liberty from family life and from the whole social and political life of the nation. Civil liberty has thus become a popular instinct. Let us guard well these prejudices and these instincts, for we may be well assured that in them lies the only real guarantee of civil liberty." William Graham Sumner   "Is the philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of the nearest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?" Thomas Henry Huxley   "Because our baker calls and we pay our bills with cheques and our clothes are washed for us and we do not know the liver from the lights, we are condemned to remain forever shut up in the confines of the middle classes wearing tail coats and silk stockings, and called Sir or Madam as the case may be, when we are all, in truth, simply Johns and Susans." Virginia Woolf   "Far from being amoral to compare costs and benefits, it is essentially moral to ask: How do we help the most? Can it really be moral to do anything less?" Bjorn Lomborg   "When the only external validation for the individual is what other individuals believe, everything depends on who those other individuals are. If they are simply people who are like-minded in general, then the consensus of the group about a particular new idea depends on what the group already believes in general—and says nothing about the empirical validity of that idea in the external world." Thomas Sowell   "It would be strange if the same God that has constructed the whole of nature on the basis of struggle, the same God that, as far as the eye can see, only bestows progress upon that which fights—it would be strange if He were then to say: no struggle, only patience! Is it possible for God to wish that today or tomorrow all struggle among men will come to an end? The whole course of culture, the development of humankind, 'world history' would come to an end along with it. Progress must be struggled for, that is an eternal law." Friedrich Naumann   "Students of grammar are aware that in certain languages, among them Greek, there exists a verbal expression between the active and the passive voices which is known as the median or middle. At times this is a mere paradox of grammar, like the humorous quirks that occur in the assignment of nominal gender; at other times, it has a reflexive sense. But there is also a class of verbs in which a middle-ground exists. Consider dunamai, 'to be able.' What is ability? In one sense, it is something that is within us, that we hold passively. On the other hand, it is a type of potential energy, containing if not action at least the promise of action. It is within this unique middle-ground that we find tragic fate. The protagonist does what he does neither because he is forced to, nor because it is all his own idea. Vaster currents are moving. Conceivably he could avoid them. We can imagine—remotely—Achilles opting to return to his anonymous and lengthy life. But then he would not be Achilles. The decision that he makes becomes himself, becomes what he is. In this sense the elusive notion of fate is closer to the concept of character. It is reflected in the reciprocity between the tragic hero as individual and as leader of a nation or race. For although he may lean toward one pole or the other, there is never a completely defined dichotomy between the public and the private man. And this is what Hegel means by the world-historical individual." David Lenson   "We believe in dialectics, and so we can't not be in favor of death." Mao Zedong   "The blood revolts against formal reason, race against rational purpose, ties against 'freedom,' which is another name for arbitrariness, organic wholeness against individualistic dissolution." Ernst Krieck   "Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense. The law of equal freedom manifestly applies to the whole race—female as well as male." Herbert Spencer   "Religious populism has been a residual agent of change in America over the last two centuries, an inhibitor of genteel tradition and a recurring source of new religious movements. Deep and powerful undercurrents of democratic Christianity distinguish the United States from other modern industrial democracies. These currents insure that churches in this land do not withhold faith from the rank and file. Instead, religious leaders have pursued people wherever they could be found; embraced them without regard to social standing; and challenged them to think, to interpret Scripture, and to organize the church for themselves." Nathan Hatch   "A large expenditure of public money to stimulate trade is a temporary expedient which begs the question. Many local governments are already taxing the people too much. Business does not need more burdens but less. The sound way to relieve distress is by direct action. When a surplus exists it will do little good to spend public money for something more we do not need. The people have more power than any government to restore their own prosperity." Calvin Coolidge   "Our banner is still the banner of peace. But if war breaks out we shall not be able to sit with folded arms. We shall have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive weight in the scales, the weight that can turn the scales." Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili   "They are all the same, Dillinger, Al Capone, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, and so on: gangsters, pirates, stock traders, businessmen. They have a single ideal: money-making, and still more money-making. American lawlessness and the double morality of Calvinism and Puritanism conceals it all." Robert Ley   "Lenin is an artist who worked on humans as other artists work on marble or metal. But human beings are harder than granite and less malleable than iron. No masterwork has emerged. The artist has failed. The task has proven beyond his powers." Benito Mussolini   "As the emphasis on aims cannot explain Germany's desire for peace in 1918, it would be surprising if the emphasis on aims could explain Germany's decision for war in 1914. Indeed Germany's aims would not have been high in 1914 if her leaders then had believed that Germany lacked adequate power. Bethmann Hollweg, chancellor of Germany at the outbreak of war, confessed later that Germany in 1914 had overvalued her strength. 'Our people,' he said, 'had developed so amazingly in the last twenty years that wide circles succumbed to the temptation of overestimating our enormous forces in relation to those of the rest of the world.'" Geoffrey Blainey   "War is frightful and an evil state of affairs worse almost than the Peace of Herbert Spencer; it is the dreadful punishment of competition instead of co-operation among nations as poverty and social decay are the dreadful consequences of competition instead of co-operating among individuals. Until nations and men learn to forget themselves in the common good of mankind poverty and war will be the substance of men's lives. We have to organise the peace and social justice of the world, we have to educate mankind to these ends, as thoroughly as the Germans have organised the State and trained their children for this war of pride and aggression upon mankind. The programme of Socialism is not complete unless it includes the peace of the world and what is to be secured not by indolence and cowardice posing as a mystical pacifism, but by the strenuous resolve of all free peoples to beat down the armed threat in their midst. The triumph of the German Emperor in this war means the end of democracy for centuries. The democratic socialist who is not doing his utmost today to overthrow German imperialism is either a deliberate traitor or a hopeless tool." Herbert George Wells   "We live in an extraordinarily debauched, interesting, savage world, where things really don't come out even. The purpose of true drama is to help remind us of that. Perhaps this does have an accidental, a cumulative social effect—to remind us to be a little more humble or a little more grateful or a little more ruminative." David Mamet