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"I have endeavoured to express the thought that to employ the category 'race' to indicate what it is to be a man, and especially as an indication of the highest attainment, is a misunderstanding and mere paganism, because the race, mankind, differs from an animal race not merely by its general superiority as a race, but by the human characteristic that every single individual within the race (not merely distinguished individuals but every individual) is more than the race. For to relate oneself to God is a far higher thing than to be related to the race and through the race to God." Soren Kierkegaard   "If a three-year-old watches someone stare at a fork and draw a scribble, she will later name the scribble 'a fork'; if the same scribble was created while the person looked at a spoon, she will call it 'a spoon.'" Paul Bloom   "The yearly income is an obsessive motif in women's fiction at the turn of the eighteenth century. Women novelists of all ranks and political opinions join hands to calculate and confirm the specific spending power of different annual incomes. Sense and Sensibility simply extends and amends a familiar financial plot shared across the whole span of contemporary women's fiction. Not to know it is to miss half the action." Edward Copeland   "The most overused word in the travel industry is escape. Escape what? Travelling is time-out between two dimly clichéd places—a here that is fraught, hectic, relentless and infuriating, and a there that is peaceful, comforting, effortless and undemanding. But if that really describes your home and your holidays, then you're living your life the wrong way around." Adrian Anthony Gill   "The assumption that what a reader wants most is unfettered freedom, rather than limited, directed, play, or that one should automatically feel nostalgia for a bygone age of collective, anonymous authorship—none of this feels at all obvious to me anymore. The house rules of a novel, the laying down of the author's peculiar terms—all of this is what interests me. This is where my pleasure is." Zadie Smith   "The doctrine of legislation and regulation by 'master minds' in whose judgment and will all the people may gladly and quietly acquiesce, has been too glaringly apparent at Washington during these last ten years. Were it possible to find 'master minds' so unselfish, so willing to decide unhesitatingly against their own personal interests or private prejudices, men almost God-like in their ability to hold the scales of justice with an even hand—such a government might be to the interests of the country; but there are none such on our political horizon, and we cannot expect a complete reversal of all the teachings of history." Franklin Roosevelt   "Writing in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, published in 1935, Mead said: 'We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.' This view found endorsement across the social sciences and solidified in the postwar years into a dogma that had clear political dimensions. There was a time when to challenge it with reference to a biological dimension to existence would be to court academic, and even social, pariah status. Like Christian theologians, the cultural determinists freed us from all biological constraints, and set mankind apart from all other life on earth. And within this view the educated man or woman pronouncing on a favored date for the transformation of human nature would be on firm ground epistemologically—we are what the world makes us, and when the world changes dramatically, then so do we in our essentials. It can all happen, as Virginia Woolf observed for herself, in the space of a generation." Ian McEwan   "We should let some people get rich first, both in the countryside and in the urban areas. To get rich by hard work is glorious." Deng Xiaoping   "If I had had to choose my place of birth, I should have chosen a society of a size confined to the range of human faculties, that is to say to the possibility of being well governed, and where, everyone being equal to his task, no one would have been compelled to commit to others the functions with which he was himself entrusted: a state where, since all individuals know one another, neither the shady stratagems of vice nor the modesty of virtue could have escaped the public's gaze and judgment, and where this gentle habit of seeing and knowing one another would have made the love of one's fatherland a love of the citizens rather than of the soil." Jean-Jacques Rousseau   "It was the dynamic and logic of the post-war conflict, rather than either general wartime brutalization caused by the First World War or some longing for unity or Volksgemeinschaft among the German bourgeoisie, as has sometimes been claimed, that explains the relative popularity of Freikorps and militias—and their willingness to employ violence—in the Germany of 1919. If it were true that veterans, as has been said, 'shifted their brutal front-line practices to the home front and went on waging war' and that virtually all members of Freikorps were 'ideologues and agitators' the men of the List Regiment would not have waited to join Freikorps until being urged by Bavarian authorities to defend their communities against Bolshevik revolutionaries. And if the argument were true that the vision of all Freikorps and of all its members 'stood completely opposed to democracy; it was, instead, a Fascist ethos that they espoused and practised,' we are left with no answer as to why DDP members such as Fridolin Solleder, and even some Jewish veterans, had fought in a few Freikorps." Thomas Weber   "Are not the United Provinces remarkable for liberty and peace? There all men, however different in notions, live in such peace and friendship with one another as is unknown to men of the same religion in other countries; where some foolish question about the antiquity and authority of hair, teeth, tears, milk, rags, handkerchiefs, smocks, bones, and other relicts, or about the immaculate conception of the virgin, or about habits and dress, about the manner of men's holding their fingers when they cross themselves, and such like mere ceremonies, or about metaphysical speculations (some of which are as little understood by the disputants themselves as by the vulgar) is fuel for the most uncharitable contention." Anthony Collins   "They were contemptuous of what, during the Civil War, Trotsky dismissed as 'papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,' a view he backed up with machine guns pointed at the backs of his own troops. For Marxists, ethics were a branch of metaphysics, superstructural flim-flam that camouflaged an iniquitous social order. Bukharin once wrote that building Communism was akin to a carpenter making a bench, with whatever was expedient being necessary: '"Ethics" transforms itself for the proletariat, step by step, into simple and comprehensible rules of conduct necessary for communism, and, in point of fact, ceases to be ethics.'" Michael Burleigh   "Freedom of the press, of expression of any kind, freedom of conscience, personal dignity, freedom of spirit etc, all the liberal fundamental rights have now been set aside without one single person feeling utterly outraged, indeed by and large without people being strongly affected at all. It is seen as a spell of bad weather. The average individual does not yet feel under attack. One might feel most profoundly disappointed over this but it is more correct to draw the conclusion that all the things that have been abolished here are no longer of great concern to people." Robert Musil   "Before the Reformation, as there was but one religion, there was but one kind of sacred music in Europe, plain chant, and the descant built upon it. That music likewise was applied to one language only, the Latin. On that account, the compositions of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Flanders, and England, kept pace in a great degree with each other in style and excellence. All the arts seem to have been the companions, if not the produce, of successful commerce: they appeared first in Italy, then in the Hanseatic towns, next in the Netherlands; and during the 16th century, when commerce became general in every part of Europe." Charles Burney   "We do not want to fight—but we have fought before. And others in earlier times have made the same dangerous mistake of assuming that the West was too selfish and too soft and too divided to resist invasions of freedom in other lands." John Kennedy   "The effect of wealth in a country is to inspire every heart with ambition: that of poverty is to give birth to despair." Charles-Louis de Secondat   "The ordinary Englishman has been duped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the name of progress. The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white pebble of the Lord's elect. They took away his maypole and his original rural life and promised him instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerce inaugurated at the Crystal Palace." Gilbert Keith Chesterton   "Achilles and Jesus have diametrically opposed attitudes towards vengeance, and it is hard to see how anyone could reconcile the two positions. It is no accident, then, that revenge emerged as one of the central issues in Renaissance drama, and particularly in England the so-called revenge tragedy became one of the dominant genres on the stage. To be sure, revenge is an inherently and perennially dramatic subject, and the Renaissance theatre had no monopoly on the theme, as a glance back to ancient Greek drama or forward to the latest Hollywood urban vigilante films will show. Still, given the hybrid nature of Renaissance culture, dramatists in the era were able to explore the issue of revenge with particular awareness of the range of ethical responses it can evoke." Paul Cantor   "We notice Roman jewellery and precious metalwork less than their post-Roman equivalents, mainly because we are distracted by a mass of other luxury items that disappeared (or became very scarce) after the end of the empire: marbled and mosaiced private houses, in both town and country; baths with piped water and underfloor heating; a plethora of exotic foods, spices, and wines; as well as immensely expensive items of pure waste, like the animals imported for the sole purpose that they should die in the amphitheatre (ideally taking with them a few unfortunate slave 'huntsmen'). Very wealthy Romans even derived status from their costly libraries and their expensive literary education. This was a world where the display of social superiority could be very subtle—while paying out huge sums of money for the barbarian slaves and exotic beasts, whose slaughter in the amphitheatre was necessary to secure his status, a Roman aristocrat could also lay claim to a philosophical education that set him above such vulgar things." Bryan Ward-Perkins   "Many intellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield casualties in pre-state societies as evidence that primitive warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States." Steven Pinker   "To punish the enemies of the fatherland, we must find out who they are: but we do not want to punish them; we want to destroy them." Maximilien Robespierre   "In a well-ordered state, the government must be only an adjunct of production, an agency charged by the producers, who pay for it, with protecting their persons and their goods while they work. In a well-ordered state, the largest possible number of persons must work, and the smallest possible number must govern." Charles Dunoyer   "Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider what nature does, but what it is good to do." John Stuart Mill   "The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty, which survives it all and generates truth simply by being a fusion of the mental and the sensual." Joseph Brodsky   "In Africa, 'no GM' is still the motto for many governments. Kenya for example has actually banned GM foods because of the supposed 'health risks' despite the fact that they could help reduce the malnutrition that is still rampant in the country—and malnutrition is by the way a proven health risk, with no further evidence needed. In Kenya if you develop a GM crop which has better nutrition or a higher yield to help poorer farmers then you will go to jail for 10 years." Mark Lynas   "During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ('money, movie stars and models of cars'), American jazz ('a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies—their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal'), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammelled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club—where an epiphany awaits him. 'The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,' he wrote; 'the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.' You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry." Martin Amis   "A third of the 26,000 species of orchids propagate by deceiving pollinators into believing that they are enjoying a non-existent reward. Foraging octopi, who can change the color patterns on their skin at a rate of three times per minute for four hours at a time, bamboozle would-be predators into complete confusion. Male antelopes use warning barks to fool frightened females into sticking around rather than search for another mate. Cuckoos and cowbirds trick other species of birds into believing that the eggs they furtively lug into their nests are their own, carrying on carefree as the duped foster parents shoulder the burden of nestling and feeding the newborn hatchlings." Oren Harman   "One may sneer as one will at its narrow-mindedness, its repressions, its dullness, but let it be remembered that it was the middle-class who first practised, if it did not invent, the virtue of financial honesty, the first class to be scrupulous about paying bills and taxes. The aristocracy paid its gambling debts but not its tailors' bills; the poor stole." Wystan Hugh Auden   "The most effectual process is that of improving the condition of man by means of his interest; and it is on this ground that I take my stand." Tom Paine   "What rather appals me (I'm writing in a hurry, and can't spell, and don't please take my words altogether literally) is the terrific conventionality of the workers. That's why—if you want explanations—I don't think they will be poets or novelists for another hundred years or so. If they can't face the fact that Lilian smokes a pipe and reads detective novels, and can't be told that they weigh on an average 12 stone—which is largely because they scrub so hard and have so many children—and are shocked by the word 'impure' how can you say that they face 'reality'? (I never know what 'reality' means: but Lilian smoking a pipe to me is real, and Lilian merely coffee coloured and discreet is not nearly so real). What depresses me is that the workers seem to have taken on all the middle class respectabilities which we—at any rate if we are any good at writing or painting—have faced and thrown out." Virginia Woolf