+

"The less we are able to satisfy our private passions, the more we abandon ourselves to those of a general nature. How comes it that monks are so fond of their order? It is owing to the very cause that renders the order insupportable. Their rule debars them from all those things by which the ordinary passions are fed, there remains therefore only this passion for the very rule that torments them. The more austere it is, that is, the more it curbs their inclinations, the more force it gives to the only passion left them." Charles-Louis de Secondat   "The estimate in which industry is held, the principles by which it is regulated, and the channels in which it is directed, not merely determine the material prosperity of nations, but also invariably contribute to the formation of a type of character, and in consequence to a modification of opinions." William Edward Hartpole Lecky   "Money was abolished in a week; total collectivization was achieved in less than two years; social distinctions were suppressed by the elimination of entire classes of property owners, intellectuals, and businessmen; and the ancient antagonism between urban and rural areas was solved by emptying the cities in a single week. It seemed that the only thing needed was sufficient willpower, and heaven would be found on Earth. Pol Pot believed that he would be enthroned higher than his glorious ancestors—Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong—and that the revolution of the twenty-first century would be conducted in Khmer, just as the revolutions of the twentieth century had been in Russian and then Chinese." Jean-Louis Margolin   "The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people that can write know anything." Walter Bagehot   "It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race." John Stuart Mill   "Liberty: Englishmen everywhere of every social rank and of every political persuasion could not celebrate it enough. Every cause, even repression itself, was wrapped in the language of English liberty. No people in the history of the world had ever made so much of it. Unlike the poor enslaved French, the English had no standing army, no lettres de cachet; they had their habeas corpus, their trials by jury, their freedom of speech and conscience, and their right to trade and travel; they were free from arbitrary arrests and punishments; their homes were their castles. Although few Englishmen and no Englishwomen could vote for representatives, they always had the sense of participating in political affairs, even if this meant only parading and huzzahing during the periodic elections of the House of Commons." Gordon Wood   "People applaud the savagery of Rowlandson or George Grosz or, more recently, the caricatures of Fluck and Law on Spitting Image. But the fault with such savagery is that it is unable to discriminate between, say, pomposity and evil, so that in the end, Princess Anne and Neil Kinnock come out looking much of a muchness with Imelda Marcos and Nicolae Ceausescu. Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s is often seen as satire's flagship—but isn't there a chance that, in undermining a fragile democracy, those satirists unwittingly helped pave the way for Nazism? (I remember the wholly and bewilderingly ironic Peter Cook growing bored with some people who were singing the praises of satire: he chipped in that were it not for the great left-wing satirists of the 1930s, Hitler might have come to power.)" Craig Brown   "Liberal education is the necessary endeavour to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness." Leo Strauss   "In the baleful wrath of Achilles, his self-absorbed brooding on the affront to his self-esteem, his anger against those who have wronged him and those who would turn him from his chosen path, in the fatal consequences of his obstinacy and in his acceptance of death, above all in that magnificent eleventh book where the three different assaults on his resolve are delivered and repulsed—here is to be found the model and even the formulas of the Sophoclean tragic situation. Sophocles might have taken for himself the Aeschylean claim that his tragedies were 'slices from the banquet of Homer.'" Bernard Knox   "The rationality of budget maximization by bureaucrats may best be illustrated by considering the consequences of contrary behavior. Consider the probable consequences for a subordinate manager who proves without question that the same output could be produced at, say, one-half the present expenditures. In a profit-seeking firm this manager would probably receive a bonus, a promotion, and an opportunity to find another such economy; if such rewards are not forthcoming in a specific firm, this manager usually has the opportunity to market his skills in another firm. In a bureau, at best, this manager might receive a citation and a savings bond, a lateral transfer, the enmity of his former colleagues, and the suspicion of his new colleagues." William Niskanen   "There are now coffee table books made of Toulouse-Lautrec art, but back then he was just trying to get people to come and buy a drink, to pay the cover charge to get into the Folies Bergère." Lee Clow   "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill." Mao Zedong   "When great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations to us, and Providence has in fact so established the order of things as that most evils are the means of producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice." Thomas Jefferson   "How did it happen that while one section of the bourgeoisie was efficiently gathering profits with unbending matter-of-factness, another was giving itself over to philosophical despair, the cult of sensitivity, and the enthronement of the nonutilitarian virtues?" Cesar Grana   "The adult male experiences desire—but he neither aims to be, nor does he want to be, the object of desire. He may certainly wish to be treated with respect, honour, duty and so forth, but he does not want to be subjected to another's control. He does not want to be the object of pursuit. Self-control, that prime virtue, means being in control of his wife, his body, his desire, his household. If his wife, his body, his desires or his household get the better of him, he runs the risk of becoming a figure of ridicule, of humiliation, or even being destroyed. A man should not submit himself to another's feelings. This attitude is summed up memorably by a nasty little anecdote in Plutarch. He describes a man who is taunted by his friends because the girl he is sleeping with doesn't really care for him. He replies: 'When I go to a restaurant, I eat fish. I don't care what the fish thinks of me.' Snappily brutal, perhaps, but it captures an archetypal male stance. He is happy to be the subject of desire, and reciprocity doesn't feature. 'Do you love me?' is just not a Greek question." Simon Goldhill   "Paradise, then, was on the world's agenda, and soon. Who would lead the world thither? Why, we would, people like us, Communists, vanguards of the working class, destined by History for the role. Exactly the same mind-set as my parents, who believed they represented God's will, working by agency of the British Empire, for the good of the world." Doris Lessing   "We found Pyongyang to be a bustling city. The only difference is that during working hours there are very few people on the street. They all have jobs or go to school. And after working hours, they pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It's like Wal-Mart in Americus, Georgia on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits. Pyongyang at night looks like Times Square. They are really heavily into bright neon lights and pictures and things like that." Jimmy Carter   "A young Polish adult is not a man, he is a Pole. He may dislike and shun all foreigners as long as he is at one with his fellow-citizens. What is needed is a national soul. For, sensibly enough, Rousseau knew that Polish survival would be salvaged in the minds of the Poles, not on the battlefield. The soldierly ideal finds its justification here. For the military life is the most perfect model of public service. Here, as in no other form of social endeavor, the individual loses his personal identity and becomes a part of a purposive social unit. Here alone the group absorbs all his resources, emotional as well as physical. For this, among other aspects, is an exclusively masculine society, a point not lost upon Rousseau. The one Spartan custom that he really disliked was the military training and equality of women. Secluded and excluded Roman matrons suited him far better. In the citizen-army, the moi humain really is crushed by the moi commun. And this is the very essence of the psychological transformation of man into a citizen." Judith Shklar   "I wonder how many of you know that it was Congressman Kennedy and not Senator Nixon who got the first citation of a Communist for perjury?" Adlai Stevenson   "The Greeks held that no one can be free except among his peers, that therefore neither the tyrant nor the despot nor the master of a household—even though he was fully liberated and was not forced by others—was free. The point of Herodotus's equation of freedom with no-rule was that the ruler himself was not free; by assuming the rule over others, he had deprived himself of those peers in whose company he could have been free. In other words, he had destroyed the political space itself, with the result that there was no freedom extant any longer, either for himself or for those over whom he ruled. The reason for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom and equality in Greek political thought was that freedom was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where people could come together—the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper." Hannah Arendt   "There is no escape from machinery and modern inventions; no escape from city vulgarity and money power, no escape from the dictatorship of the uncultured." John Cowper Powys   "I do not feel, on the one hand, my body, and on the other, my soul; I feel my soul in my body. All my sensations seem to me only modifications of the same substance, and I do not understand what could be meant by 'corporeal sensations.'" Étienne Bonnot de Condillac   "Pablo Neruda, the great poet of Latin America, comes from Chile. I translated a number of his poems into Polish. Pablo Neruda has been a Communist for some ten years. When he describes the misery of his people, I believe him and I respect his great heart. When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not about himself, and so to him the power of the word is given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I am inclined to believe him as long as he speaks about what he knows; I stop believing him when he starts to speak about what I know myself." Czeslaw Milosz   "It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle." Tom Paine   "Today's organs are replicas of organs in our ancestors whose design worked better than the alternatives, thereby enabling them to become our ancestors. Natural selection is the only physical process we know of that can simulate engineering, because it is the only process in which how well something works can play a causal role in how it came to be." Steven Pinker   "No such sustained acceleration in economic growth had happened before; nor did it stop. On the contrary, even faster growth meant that the average Briton in 1960 was nearly six times richer than his great-grandfather had been in 1860. Especially striking was the speed with which the British labour force left agriculture for other sectors (not only manufacturing but also services). As early as 1850 little more than a fifth of the active population in Britain was engaged in farming, at a time when the figure was closer to 45 per cent even in the Low Countries. By 1880 fewer than one in seven Britons worked on the land; by 1910 it was one in eleven." Niall Ferguson   "Optimists and pessimists alike conceived of the future—our present—as a uniform society, a flattened, unnuanced world designed by a few smart men. They didn't imagine the quirky products of creativity applied to small-scale, personal problems and passions. They didn't factor in the power of vanity, self-expression, chance, novelty, or fun." Virginia Postrel   "It so happens that the U.S. Bureau of the Census actually counted servants while Veblen was working out his ideas. It discovered 296 footmen, 2,436 valets, 22,000 nursemaids and ladies' maids—in a nation with twenty million households. Less than one family in ten thousand had such servants. Veblen's magnificent diatribes, therefore, described an exceedingly tiny group, as did the stories that proliferated in the Pulitzer and Hearst papers. America actually had more monks than valets, though no one went on about its asceticism." Stanley Lebergott   "Where moralists had long urged that necessity knows no law, the economic analysts who pursued price back to demand had discovered a lawfulness in necessity, and in doing so they had come upon a possibility and a reality. The reality was that individuals making decisions about their own persons and property were the determiners of price in the market. The possibility was that the economic rationalism of market participants could supply the order to the economy formerly secured through authority." Joyce Appleby   "The members of the new upper class are industrious to the point of obsession, but there are no derogatory labels for adults who are not industrious. The young women of the new upper class hardly ever have babies out of wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital births. You will probably raise a few eyebrows even if you use a derogatory label for criminals. When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." Charles Murray   "I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justifications against fate itself." Albert Camus