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"When Stalin proclaimed the most democratic constitution in the world, when in his speeches he opposed false Western democracy to the true democracy, he was not seeking to persuade, but to intimidate by falsehood, a falsehood so enormous and so crushing that it drew its amazing force from the daring improbability with which it was imposed, because that showed just what the government was capable of." Alain Besancon   "Wal-Mart employees are paid more than about one-third of American workers. Does that make Wal-Mart a nicer, better company than the lower-wage employers? Does it make Goldman Sachs—with its average compensation in the hundreds of thousands of dollars—a friendlier, more moral company than Wal-Mart? And if our concern is low wages, why don't we focus on the roughly 40 million jobs that pay even less?" Jason Furman   "When the British Government very unwisely allowed the Kaiser to be present at a naval review at Spithead, the thought which arose in his mind was not the one which we had intended. What he thought was, 'I must have a Navy as good as Grandmamma's.' And from this thought have sprung all our subsequent troubles. The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation." Bertrand Russell   "Almighty God, you who hold all Minds in your hands, deliver us from our Fathers' Enlightenment and fatal arts, and restore us to ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the only goods that can make for our happiness and that are precious in your sight." Jean-Jacques Rousseau   "The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson." Henry Hazlitt   "We used to say what we meant, 'poor countries.' That became unfashionable, in part because poverty is sometimes a bit of your own doing and not a state of pure victimhood. So, it became polite to call dysfunctional backwaters 'developing.' That was already a lie (or at best highly wishful thinking) since the whole point is that they aren't developing. But now bien-pensant circles don't want to endorse 'development' as a worthwhile goal anymore. 'South'—well, nice places like Australia, New Zealand and Chile are there too (at least from a curiously North-American and European-centric perspective). So now it's called 'global south,' which though rather poor as directions for actually getting anywhere, identifies the speaker as the caring sort of person who always uses the politically correct word." John Cochrane   "I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves. One would wonder, indeed, how it should happen that women are conversible at all; since they are only beholden to natural parts, for all their knowledge. Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew or make baubles. They are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write their names, or so; and that is the height of a woman's education. And I would but ask any who slight the sex for their understanding, what is a man (a gentleman, I mean) good for, that is taught no more?" Daniel Defoe   "The power of the Passion for Christians in the Middle Ages—and today—is the realization that the abjected body of Christ, spat on, beaten, bleeding, crucified, is the image of humanity's sinfulness projected from the inner realm of one's spiritual being outward and onto the guiltless sacrificial victim. Christ as a sacrificial lamb is not a freestanding entity, however, for someone had to offer him—not Jews, but his own Father. Explaining why people think of God as 'the God of unequaled violence,' Girard explains that 'he not only requires the blood of the victim who is closest to him, most precious and dear to him, but he also envisages taking revenge upon the whole of mankind for a death that he both required and anticipated.' The death of Christ as a sacrificial lamb is not easily separated from the idea of vengeance against those who put him to death. Medieval knights understood both sides of this model. They saw themselves first as avengers of Christ's foes, and second as Christians who suffered and died for the faith. Even so, they could not see themselves as sacrificial victims, although the example of holy men who were martyrs—thus sacrificial victims—was always before them." Allen Frantzen   "Under the debris of our shattered cities, the last so-called achievements of the middle-class nineteenth century have been buried." Joseph Goebbels   "We have already said that there exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others; the party of the farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and scientists, and the party of the courtiers, office holders, monks, permanent armies, pirates, and beggars." Charles Comte   "Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize." Daniel Kahneman   "I don't know if you've noticed, but rich people are all for non-violence. Why wouldn't they be? They've got what they want. They want to make sure people don't take their stuff." Barack Obama   "Could they be happier without it, the law, as a useless thing, would of itself vanish; and that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices. So that however it may be mistaken, the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law; and is not, as we are told, 'a liberty for every man to do what he lists.' For who could be free, when every other man's humour might domineer over him? But a liberty to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own." John Locke   "No tutor would accept from a pupil the reasons given by Plato for the following quite important doctrines: that the Soul is tri-partite; that if the Soul is tri-partite, the ideal society would be a three-class state; that whatever exists, exists to perform one and only one function; that reason is one such function; that one and only one of the classes should be taught to reason; that membership of a class should normally be determined by pedigree; that empirical science can never be 'real' science; that there are Forms; that only knowledge of Forms is 'real science'; that only those who have this knowledge can have good political judgement; that political institutions must degenerate unless there are rulers who have had the sort of education that Plato describes; that 'justice' consists in doing one's own job; and so on." Gilbert Ryle   "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." Eric Blair   "Ours is perhaps the last age in which one can still travel. Already we can barely escape our civilization. The picture remains astonishingly the same from one part of the world to the next." Harry Kessler   "I have experienced many varieties of arrogance, in myself and in others. But since I myself shared these varieties for a time in my youth, I must confess from personal experience that there is no more consuming, more insolent, more sneering, more diabolical arrogance, than that of the artistic advance guard and radical intellectuals who are bursting with a vain mania to be deep and dark and subtle and to inflict pain. Amid the amused and indignant laughter of hell of a few philistines, we were the indignant stokers who preheated the hell in which mankind is now roasting." Franz Werfel   "Were the governments of Africa to confer a price rise on all rural producers, the political benefits would be low; for both supporters and dissidents would secure the benefits of such a measure, with the result that it would generate no incentives to support the government in power. The conferral of benefits in the form of public works projects, such as state farms, on the other hand, has the political advantage of allowing the benefits to be selectively apportioned. The schemes can be given to supporters and withheld from opponents." Robert Bates   "One may doubt that Elizabethan readers seriously thought that all merchants were usurers, any more than they thought all gentlemen were greedy landlords. But in literary terms, the gentleman had an advantage over the merchant because he had alternate images as knight, courtier and governor, whereas the merchant's image, until quite late in Elizabeth's reign, was determined almost exclusively by the moralists. A few chroniclers might insert the good deeds of merchants in their works, but until these good deeds started to be portrayed on the stage, the merchant was most familiar to Elizabethans as a man who beggared the poor in order to enrich himself, a godless man who went to church only to arrest debtors, and a miser who thought only of his money on his deathbed." Laura Caroline Stevenson   "Stoics were especially keen on pitiless mental rehearsals of all the things they dreaded most. Epicureans were more inclined to turn their vision away from terrible things, to concentrate on what was positive. A Stoic behaves like a man who tenses his stomach muscles and invites an opponent to punch them. An Epicurean prefers to invite no punches, and, when bad things happen, simply to step out of the way." Sarah Bakewell   "That Don Quixote's adventures have been so idealized, not to say Christianized, says more about the idealizing tendencies of Christianity than about Cervantes's novel. It is as if those determined to see Don Quixote as some kind of saint or missionary of the spirit had simply closed their eyes to the mayhem and suffering he causes. Andrés, the flogged boy, is right: Don Quixote's good intentions have perverse consequences. Perhaps Cervantes was interested, then, not only in the pious triumphs of his Knight but also in his pious defeats? And perhaps this interest, despite what may be said about Cervantes's own Catholicism, has a secular, even blasphemous bent? Dostoevsky, who was very interested in Don Quixote, surely saw this when he created the figure of Prince Myshkin, the Idiot, whose Christlike actions have a way of contaminating the world around him. Prince Myshkin is not just too good for the world; he is dangerously too good." James Wood   "Kant insists over and over again that what distinguishes man is his moral autonomy as against his physical heteronomy—for his body is governed by natural laws, not issuing from his own inner self. No doubt this doctrine owes a great deal to Rousseau, for whom all dignity, all pride rest upon independence. To be manipulated is to be enslaved. A world in which one man depends upon the favour of another is a world of masters and slaves, of bullying and condescension and patronage at one end, and obsequiousness, servility, duplicity and resentment at the other. But whereas Rousseau supposes that only dependence on other men is degrading, for no one resents the laws of nature, only ill will, the Germans went further. For Kant, total dependence on non-human nature—heteronomy—was incompatible with choice, freedom, morality." Isaiah Berlin   "Federalists and anti-federalists both agreed that man in his deepest nature was selfish and corrupt; that blind ambition most often overcomes even the most clear-eyed rationality; and that the lust for power was so overwhelming that no one should ever be trusted with unqualified authority. The difference between the two parties lay in the conclusion they reached with respect to the extent and power of a central government. Because the anti-federalists saw corruption and the lust for power everywhere, they argued that the weaker the power available, the less harm the manipulation of power could do. The federalists argued that the problem in the American situation had been exaggerated. Yes, people were innately evil and self-seeking, and yes, no one could be trusted with unconfined power. That was as true in America as anywhere else. But under the Constitution's checks and balances power would be far from unconfined, and for such a self-limiting system there would be virtue enough for success." Bernard Bailyn   "The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, its continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses. Villagers who themselves feared to ascend the mountaintops located their departed ones on the impenetrable heavenly heights." Daniel Boorstin   "I'm convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: a better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it." Ronald Reagan   "Power and strict accountability for its use are the essential constituents of good government. A sense of highest responsibility, a dignifying and elevating sense of being trusted, together with a consciousness of being in an official station so conspicuous that no faithful discharge of duty can go unacknowledged and unrewarded, and no breach of trust undiscovered and unpunished, these are the influences, the only influences, which foster practical, energetic, and trustworthy statesmanship. The best rulers are always those to whom great power is intrusted in such a manner as to make them feel that they will surely be abundantly honored and recompensed for a just and patriotic use of it, and to make them know that nothing can shield them from full retribution for every abuse of it." Woodrow Wilson   "To take away freedom is to take away humanness. A society in which the individual is beset by ranks of nannies, secret policemen and a hundred kinds of authority joined together to make you behave in the way you would, according to authority, voluntarily behave if only you weren't so misguided and ignorant, is, the Romantics insisted, a deeply immoral society." Tom Stoppard