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"A fish knows how to swim the instant it hatches, and off it darts to fend for itself. When a duckling hatches, it can follow its mother over land and across the water within moments. Foals, still dripping with amniotic fluid, spend a few minutes buckling around to get the feel of their legs, then join the herd. Not so with humans. We come out limp and squalling and utterly dependent on round-the-clock care and supervision. We mature glacially, and do not approach anything resembling adult competence for many, many years. Obviously we must gain some very large advantage from this costly, not to mention risky up-front investment, and we do: It's called culture." Vilayanur Ramachandran   "Pablo Neruda was instrumental in smoothing the assassin's path but never wrote a poem on the subject: something to remember when reading the thousands of ecstatic love poems he did write. They are full of wine and roses, but no ice ax is ever mentioned. Admirers of Neruda don't seem to mind. The same capacity for tacit endorsement is shown by Trotsky's admirers, who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class; or anyway, and at the very worst, as one of those large-hearted Old Bolsheviks who might have made the Soviet Union some kind of successfully egalitarian society had they prevailed. But when it became clear that the vast crime called the collectivization of agriculture would involve a massacre of the peasantry, Trotsky's only criticism was that Stalin's campaign was not sufficiently 'militarized.' He meant that the peasants weren't being massacred fast enough." Clive James   "Moral wisdom is less like knowing answers to test questions and more like simply being aware that the test is in progress right now." David Schmidtz   "Time is the condition and frame of our human existence, and to reject it is 'to be in love with the impossible.' But in Sophocles it is through this refusal to accept human limitations that humanity achieves its true greatness." Bernard Knox   "The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class. Working class, yes; upper-middle class: most certainly; lower-middle class: never! Lower-middle class is, indeed, per definitionem, the class to which the majority of the population belongs with the exception of the few thousand people you know." George Mikes   "When mere riches or court-favour are supposed to constitute rank, the mind is misled from the consideration of qualities on which it ought to rely. Magnanimity, courage, and the love of mankind, are sacrificed to avarice and vanity, or suppressed under a sense of dependance. The individual considers his community so far only as it can be rendered subservient to his personal advancement or profit: he states himself in competition with his fellow-creatures; and, urged by the passions of emulation, of fear and jealousy, of envy and malice, he follows the maxims of an animal destined to preserve his separate existence, and to indulge his caprice or his appetite, at the expense of his species." Adam Ferguson   "When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn't indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid." Edward Conard   "The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger; and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain, as the gout or stone. It sooner and oftener produces despair, and a detestation of existence; of equal importance to individuals, to families, and to nations." John Adams   "The Divine Right of Kings is best understood as the first form of something which has continued to affect our lives ever since—the modern theory of sovereignty. It is often called Austinian, but might just as well be called Johnsonian, for it is very clearly stated in Taxation No Tyranny: 'all government is ultimately and essentially absolute.' On this view, total freedom to make what laws it pleases, superiority to the law because it is the source of law, is the characteristic of every state; of democratic states no less than monarchial. That doctrine has proved so popular that it now seems to many a mere tautology. We conceive with difficulty that it was ever new because we imagine with difficulty how political life can ever have gone on without it. We take it for granted that the highest power in the State, whether that power is a despot or a democratically elected assembly, will be wholly free to legislate and incessantly engaged in legislation." Clive Staples Lewis   "It's sad that all the things one believes in—such as democracy, economic equality etc—should turn out in practice to be so repulsively unpleasant." Aldous Huxley   "The individual robber in a populous society obtains such a narrow or minute share of any loss or gain to society that he ignores the damage his thievery does to society. By contrast, the Mafia family that monopolizes crime in a community has, because of this monopoly, a moderately encompassing interest or stake in the income of that community, so it takes the interest of the community into account in using its coercive power. Whereas the individual criminal in a populous society bears only a minuscule share of the social loss from his crime, the gang with a secure monopoly on crime in a neighborhood obtains a significant fraction of the total income of the community from its protection tax theft. Because of the encompassing interest in the income of society that this monopoly gives, it bears a significant fraction of social losses, including those from its own protection tax theft. Therefore, though the individual criminal normally takes all of the money in the wallet he steals, the secure and rational Mafia leader never sets a protection tax rate anywhere near 100 percent: this would reduce the neighborhood's income so much that the Mafia family itself would be a net loser." Mancur Olson   "Everything has been put up to market, and sold for the highest price it would buy. Farmers used formerly to be attached to their landlords, and labourers to their farmers who employed them. All that kind of feeling has vanished. In like manner, the connection between the trading and landed interests of country towns undergoes no modification whatever from personal feeling, whereas within my memory it was almost wholly governed by it. A country squire or substantial yeoman used formerly to resort to the same shops which his father had frequented before him, and nothing but a serious injury, real or supposed, would have appeared to him a justification for breaking up a connection which was attended with substantial amity, and interchanges of hospitality, from generation to generation. All this moral cement is dissolved; habits and prejudices are broken and rooted up, nothing being substituted in their place but a quickened self-interest, with more extensive views and wider dependencies, but more lax in proportion as they are wider. The Ministry will do well if they keep things quiet for the present; but if our present constitution in Church and State is to last, it must rest as heretofore upon a moral basis—and they who govern the country must be something superior to mere financiers and political economists." William Wordsworth   "We know how to prevent breast cancer: You live like a Chinese peasant who lived 100 years ago. You work in the fields, on a meager diet, so you have your first period at age 17 and then you start having a child every year." Bruce Ames   "In the spring of 2001 the fashion company Prada released a collection titled Prada Meinhof. 'This is their entry and access, and if they choose to be interested in fashion I cannot help it,' sighed Astrid Proll, who cashed in by publishing an expensive coffee-table book of her Baader-Meinhof photos. 'We're all slaves of fashion.' Proll came to London in 2002 for a week-long festival of films and talks about the Baader-Meinhof Group, hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Arts. 'It's a media event, really,' she said. 'But I at least want to get some money out of it, you know what I mean, and it'll help my profile. I earn my money from the RAF, so why not keep it up?'" Francis Wheen   "I consider my contributions to scientific fact far less important than my attempts to awaken an emotional response to the world of Nature." Rachel Carson   "Impossible to take up a newspaper without being impressed with this fact of extending and deepening Vulgarity. It seems to be greatly due to American influence, but there can be no doubt that the ground is prepared for it by the pretence of education afforded by our School-board system. Society is being levelled down, and with strange rapidity. Democracy scarcely pretends to a noble aim; it is triumphing by the force of its appeal to lower motives. Thus, I am convinced, the gulf between the really refined and the masses grows, and will grow, constantly wider. Before long, we shall have an aristocracy of mind and manners more distinct from the vast majority of the population than aristocracy has ever been in England. It will not be a fighting aristocracy, but a retiring and reticent; scornful, hopeless." George Gissing   "As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning. The petty mail clerk, who ordinarily sorted letters early and late, who sorted constantly, who sorted from Monday until Saturday without interruption; the clerk, the cobbler, had suddenly achieved a romantic possibility in life: he could become a hero, and everyone who wore a uniform was already being cheered by the women, and greeted beforehand with this romantic appellation by those who had to remain behind. They acknowledged the unknown power which had lifted them out of their everyday existence." Stefan Zweig   "Discovery is a trial and error process, what the French molecular biologist François Jacob called bricolage. From the textile machinery of the industrial revolution to the discovery of many pharmaceutical drugs, it was tinkering and evolutionary serendipity we have to thank, not design from first principles." Matt Ridley   "A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing. It's tempting to assume that central control is better than markets for arranging all sorts of group effort. (Indeed, during the twentieth century much of the world lived under governments that made that assumption.) But there is a strong limiting factor to this directed management, and that is the cost of management itself. Richard Hackman, a Harvard professor of psychology, has studied the size and effectiveness of work groups in Leading Teams. Hackman tells a story about a man who ran a nonprofit whose board of directors numbered forty. When asked what he thought such a large board could accomplish, he replied, 'Nothing,' in a way that implied he liked it that way. Because of managerial overhead, large groups can get bogged down, and whenever transaction costs become too expensive to manage within a single organization, markets outperform firms (and central management generally)." Clay Shirky   "According to the present trend, we may suppose that even on the morning after the Day of Judgment—if such a thing were possible—every cabaret, every night club, every newspaper firm eager for advertisements and subscribers, every nest of political fanatics, every pagan discussion group, indeed, every Christian tea-party and Church synod would resume business to the best of its ability, and with a new sense of opportunity, completely unmoved, quite uninstructed, and in no serious sense different from what it was before. Fire, drought, earthquake, war, pestilence, the darkening of the sun and similar phenomena are not the things to plunge us into real anguish, and therefore to give us real peace." Karl Barth   "In 2000, people who lived in historic districts in Manhattan were on average almost 74 percent wealthier than people who lived outside such areas. Almost three-quarters of the adults living in historic districts had college degrees, as opposed to 54 percent outside them. People living in historic districts were 20 percent more likely to be white. The well-heeled historic-district denizens who persuade the landmarks commission to prohibit taller structures have become the urban equivalent of those restrictive suburbanites who want to mandate five-acre lot sizes to keep out the riffraff. It's not that poorer people could ever afford 980 Madison Avenue, but restricting new supply anywhere makes it more difficult for the city to accommodate demand, and that pushes up prices everywhere." Ed Glaeser   "In Ulysses we discern the ghost of a great realist novel, the pinnacle and culmination of the nineteenth-century form—the book that might have been, had Joyce closed his ears to much of the modernist claptrap buzzing round him and reined in his innovative urges. Are we really as impressed as we pretend to be by the gestatory bravura of the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode, or by the codscientific interrogations of 'Ithaca,' or by the gigantism of 'Cyclops'?" John Banville   "What I am getting at is the serene intolerant complacency manifested by many working-class people, especially older women; the skin-tight armour against any unfamiliar idea. I remember once explaining to a landlady of mine that the sun didn't really put the fire out (it only looked as if it did) and so she could leave off drawing the blinds on a bright autumn afternoon. She heard me out politely, standing by the hearth, then went and drew the blinds as usual, 'just in case.' I would admit that there can be middle-class versions of that kind of thing. And I must certainly add that it has an obverse side which ought to preclude exasperation: the apathy and bewilderment likely to be shown by working people when they come up against officialdom." Kingsley Amis   "Roughly speaking, the Habsburg Empire was torn between the cosmopolitan liberalism of the higher bourgeoisie, and the nationalist and socialist leaning of the ethnic groups, including the German speakers. The philosophical expression of the former interest was the ideal of an open society, individualist and cosmopolitan, an idea elaborated and made famous by Popper. The latter interest expressed itself largely in the romanticism of Gemeinschaft, of a closed community suffused by intimate affective relations, and delimited by an idiosyncratic culture which sustained those relations and endowed them with rich symbolic expression. It found its sacrament in the village green and the festival, not in the free market, whether of goods or ideas. Hayek and Popper, of course, voted for Gesellschaft, or the Open Society." Ernest Gellner   "If you have nothing to say, or, rather, something extremely stupid and obvious, say it, but in a 'plonking' tone of voice—i.e. roundly, but hollowly and dogmatically." Stephen Potter   "Like Achilles, Socrates no doubt realized that the inflexible stand he was taking before the court that day, one that would brook no compromise with his divine mission, made his death inevitable. Yet he concludes: 'For wherever a man's place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything but of disgrace.'" James Colaiaco   "Rampaging by teenagers has always been a problem in the cities. From the very earliest times, harassing the watch, vandalism, and arson have been favorite pastimes of the young. In Pittsburgh in 1809 an editor proposed satirically that the city establish a 'conflagration fund' from which to buy twelve houses, one to be burned each month in a civil celebration. Until the middle of the last century fire companies in the large cities were manned by volunteers, mostly boys and young men, and were in many cases what today would be called conflict gangs. Whether they put out more fires than they started is a question. In Philadelphia, for example, firemen used to riot almost every Sunday, using bricks, stones, and firearms, apparently with intent to kill. In the slums of the large cities there were also street gangs, some claiming more than a thousand members, which fought each other and the police almost constantly. Usually the authorities did not try very hard to interfere with these activities, which were regarded as in the nature of sporting events." Edward Banfield   "As necessary and insignificant as death with all its cruelties in the cosmos still the Cheka's horrors are in their degree, and will end sooner! What matters it whom we kill to lessen the foulest murder that deprives most folk of real lives?" Christopher Grieve   "Throughout history, when leaders have tried to unite a social group they have trained their members to think of it as a family and to redirect their familial emotions inside it. The names used by groups that strive for solidarity—brethren, brotherhoods, fraternal organizations, sisterhood, sororities, crime families, the family of man—concede in their metaphors that kinship is the paradigm to which they aspire. (No society tries to strengthen the family by likening it to a trade union, political party, or church group.)" Steven Pinker   "You chose a vague heroism, because it is the only value left in a world that has lost its meaning. And, having chosen it for yourselves, you chose it for everybody else and for us. We were forced to imitate you in order not to die. But we became aware then that our superiority over you consisted in our having a direction. Now that all that is about to end, we can tell you what we have learned—that heroism isn't much and that happiness is more difficult." Albert Camus