+

"If people want a sense of purpose, they should get it from their archbishops. They should not hope to receive it from their politicians." Harold Macmillan   "The world which is here set before us may be grotesque and distracted; but we are not asked to be interested in that world. Had Hamlet himself been interested in it, he would have acted more rationally. It was not intelligence or courage that he lacked; it was practical conviction or sense for reality. Had he possessed this he would have turned his wits and sympathies towards improving the state of Denmark, as he turns them towards improving the player's art. In truth he cared nothing for the world; man pleased him not, no, nor woman, neither; and we may well abandon to its natural confusion a dream in which we do not believe. Had Hamlet tried to justify his temperament by expressing it in a philosophy, he would have been an idealist. He would have said that events were only occasions for exercising the spirit; they were nothing but imagined situations meant to elicit a certain play of mind." George Santayana   "Although today it is considered shameful and craven, the policy of appeasement once occupied almost the whole moral high ground. The word was originally synonomous with idealism, magnanimity of the victor and the willingness to right wrongs." Andrew Roberts   "When one looks back at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine famine—about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and exiled counts driving taxi-cabs. Italy means picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and museums—but not Black-shirts. Germany means films, nudism, and psychoanalysis—but not Hitler, of whom hardly anyone had heard till 1931." Eric Blair   "I really can't say whether things will be better if they are changed; what I can say is that things must be changed if they are going to improve." Georg Christoph Lichtenberg   "You are now acting upon your own world and trying to shape it. That it's complicated and difficult, that you're like a child who doesn't know how to walk, that you're inexperienced in this because you've not been allowed to do it for 35 years, yes, all of this is true. You will stumble and make many mistakes as a consequence. This is also true. But you are a human being again precisely because the world of politics has in some small way begun to be reclaimed by you." Kanan Makiya   "It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass, but within the wide verge he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities." Alexis de Tocqueville   "The workingmen earning nearly double their former wages—their houses mostly new and comfortable, and the lands, roads and every other circumstance bearing evident marks of the most pleasing and rapid improvements. From whence, and from what cause has this happy change taken place? You will be beforehand with me in acknowledging a truth too evident to be denied by any one. Industry has been the parent of this happy change. A well directed and long continued series of industrious exertions, both in masters and servants has so changed for the better the face of our country, its buildings, lands, roads, and not withstanding the present unfavourable appearances, I must say the manners and deportment of its inhabitants too as to attract the notice and admiration of countries which had scarcely heard of us before; and how far these improvements may still be carried by the same laudable means which have brought us thus far, has been one of the most pleasing contemplations of my life." Josiah Wedgwood   "No man who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." Edmund Burke   "The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status, and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels." Steven Pinker   "When it was all over I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover's years as secretary of commerce and then as president. I had to conclude that his policies were substantially correct. The New Deal owed much to what he had begun." Rexford Tugwell   "It is easy to be tolerant of unimportant differences. But all of us tend to think the worst of people who disagree with us on really important things. We tend to assume that our opponents followed the same chain of reasoning we did, so that if they reject our conclusion, they must also reject our most fundamental premise." Douglas Laycock   "Look at the world around us, and how it is changing. Our university campuses are now islands of repression in a sea of freedom." Abigail Thernstrom   "Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine—despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide." Matt Ridley   "The appeasers distrusted France, blamed her for the punitive Versailles clauses, felt Germany had been wronged, and were determined to make restitution. Lord Lothian declared that it was Britain's moral obligation to support the Germans in their struggle to 'escape from encirclement' (the encircling powers, presumably, being France, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg) 'to a position of balance.' He neglected to add that any shift in the status quo would mean the liquidation of legitimate governments. At Versailles the 1914-1918 holocaust had been blamed on the Germans. Now the fashionable scapegoat was Germany's ancient enemy. 'Lady Astor,' The Week reported, 'is obsessed with a vivid personal dislike of the French.' As late as November 7, 1936, a member of the cabinet told his ministerial colleagues that Francophobia was increasing in England because the French were an obstacle to Britain 'getting on terms with the dictator powers.'" William Manchester   "It is most certain that our countrymen are not and never were Spartans in their contempt of weath, and I will go farther and say they ought not to be. Such a trait in their character would render them lazy drones, unfit for the agriculture, manufacture, fisheries, and commerce, and population of their country, and fit only for war." John Adams   "Journalists, like novelists and filmmakers, used to romanticize warfare by closing their eyes to much of the horror of it; now they romanticize the victims of war and so undermine war's foundations by looking at nothing but its horrors. In the media's reporting of war, honor and glory have become at least as invisible as the ghastly flow of blood and viscera once were to their predecessors. Nowadays, any journalist who wants to succeed knows he is in the business not of celebrating honor or trust or heroism but of exposing whatever sordid realities may be found (or invented) beneath the appearances of those things. And if the romantic prize is now awarded to those who tell tales of war's evils, why should we not suppose that the supply of those evils will rise to meet the journalistic demand, just as the supply of heroes rose when the demand was for tales of heroism?" James Bowman   "No country that wishes to become developed today can pursue closed-door policies. We have tasted this bitter experience and our ancestors have tasted it. In the early Ming Dynasty in the reign of Yong Le when Zheng He sailed the Western Ocean, our country was open. After Yong Le died the dynasty went into decline. China was invaded. Counting from the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the opium wars, through 300 years of isolation China was made poor, and became backward and mired in darkness and ignorance." Deng Xiaoping   "The scholastics, Petrarch complained, were always prepared to tell us things which 'even if they were true, would not contribute anything whatsoever' to enrich our lives—while remaining indifferent to such vital questions as 'man's nature, the purposes for which we are born and whereunto we travel'. In place of scholastic abstractions men should turn their minds to the moral, psychological and social questions which had always been at the heart of the rhetorical as opposed to the philosophical tradition. In his De remediis Petrarch himself dealt with more than 250 commonplace situations in which human beings might be tempted either to despair or elation, offering advice on how best to cope with the emotional crises of life. The last thing the Renaissance humanists wanted to do was to replace the scholastic with another system of philosophical thought. Instead they aimed at reviving a role which scholastic (but not classical) philosophy had neglected." Alan Bullock   "People know more than they are told. They know when they are loved, and did even in eras when 'love' was not the all-purpose catchword it has become." John Updike   "A minimum-test of the intrinsic merit of anything written is this, that some non-historical reason can be given why it should be read: a reason, I mean, absolutely independent of the fact that other people have read it. Hume's Dialogues, for example, easily pass this test; so does Lucian; so does Montaigne; so do the pre-Socratic philosophers. But who can supply a reason, of this kind, why anyone should read Kant, or Green, or Bradley?" David Stove   "All lawyers are loose in their youth, but an insular country subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen." Benjamin Disraeli   "The 1929 budget was $3.1 billion, and Hoover's first budget in 1930 had $3.3 billion in spending, followed by $3.6 billion, $4.7 billion, and $4.6 billion over the following three years. In nominal terms, he increased spending 48 percent over the last budget of the previous administration. However, this period was one of significant deflation, so if we adjust for the approximately 10 percent per year fall in prices over that period, the real size of government spending in 1933 was almost double that of 1929. The budget deficits of 1931 and 1932 represented 52.5 percent and 43.3 percent of total federal expenditures. No year between 1933 and 1941 under Roosevelt had a deficit that large." Steven Horwitz   "The courts demanded that other institutions, like universities and corporations, work toward equal representation of men and women. How about the courts applying the same criteria to themselves and insisting that women get half of seats in the electric chair?" Roy Baumeister   "Even relative to the size of her army, Britain lost fewer men than France or Germany. But as Britain also mobilised fewer of her potential soldiers than her allies and enemies, when the degree of mobilisation is taken into account, her relative rate of loss falls even further. For every thousand of the total wartime population, roughly 16 Britons were killed in the war, compared to 30 in Germany, 34 in France and 57 in Serbia." Dan Todman   "Every increase in coverage means an increase in premiums. If your employer is paying for your health insurance, he could be paying you more in salary instead. Or, he could be lowering prices and selling his product to you and all consumers more cheaply. Someone is paying." John Cochrane   "Everyone found a part of him in Jack. Before that, politics was just left to all the corny old people who shouted on the Fourth of July—and you know, all the things that made me so bored with politics." Jacqueline Kennedy   "No one in his senses, or imbued with the slightest knowledge of physics will ever think that the earth, heavy and unwieldy from its own weight and mass, staggers up and down around its own centre and that of the sun; for at the slightest jar of the earth, we would see cities and fortresses, towns and mountains thrown down." Jean Bodin   "The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why the traveller's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller." Paul Theroux   "The evil is in the White House at the present. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood." Tip O'Neill