+ "The usual effect of the attempts of government to encourage consumption is merely to prevent saving; that is, to promote unproductive consumption at the expense of reproductive, and diminish the national wealth by the very means which were intended to increase it." John Stuart Mill "We tend to be most fascinated with high drama, and that fascination leads us to identify love with romance—the love of Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde or Anna and Vronsky—rather than the prosaic, family love of Levin and Kitty. For Tolstoy, it is the latter that really matters. As romance thrives on mystery, prosaic love cultivates daily intimacy. As War and Peace may be seen as an attack on the romanticisation of war, Anna Karenina discredits the romanticisation of love." Gary Saul Morson "When Americans are asked about dangers today, they are likely first to mention terrorists, plane crashes, and nuclear accidents, even though those three dangers combined have killed far fewer Americans over the last four decades combined than do cars, alcohol, or smoking in any single year. When Americans' rankings of risks are compared with actual annual deaths caused (or with probability of death per hour of the risky activity), it turns out that people greatly overrate the risk of nuclear reactor accidents (ranked as the number-one danger by American college students and women voters), and also overrate the risks of DNA-based technologies, other new chemical technologies, and spray cans. Americans underrate the risks of alcohol, cars, and smoking, and (to a lesser extent) of surgery, home appliances, and food preservatives. Underlying these biases of ours are that we especially fear events beyond our control, events with the potential for killing lots of people, and situations involving new, unfamiliar, or hard-to-assess risks (hence our fear of terrorists, plane crashes, and nuclear reactor accidents). Conversely, we are inappropriately accepting of old familiar risks that appear to be within our control, that we accept voluntarily, and that kill individuals rather than groups of people. That's why we underrate the risks of driving cars, alcohol, smoking, and standing on step-ladders: we choose to do those things, we feel that we control them, and we know that they kill other people, but we think that they won't kill us because we consider ourselves careful and strong. As Chauncey Starr expressed it, 'We are loath to let others do unto us what we happily do to ourselves.'" Jared Diamond "People think that the more natural something is, the better it is for them. That is simply not the case. In fact, it is the opposite that is true: the closer a plant is to its natural state, the more likely it is that it will poison you. Naturally, plants do not want to be eaten, so we have spent 10,000 years developing agriculture and breeding out harmful traits from crops. 'Natural agriculture' is a contradiction in terms." Ottoline Leyser "Urban trading communities may call on their citizens to take part in the common defence of the city, and will in extremity do so. Nonetheless, they will be less eager to do it continuously, and make less of a song and dance about it. The practice of violence will not pervade their ethos. Quite often, they will not be averse to employing mercenaries. The reason is simple: excellence in trade or production, like excellence in most other activities, requires concentration, and a really good performance may well take up most of the practitioner's time. A pastoralist does not mind giving up much of his time to practising violence—minding the flocks leaves him the required leisure. In any case, minding flocks against depredations by wild animals or, above all, by other shepherds, in any case constitutes a permanent training in violence." Ernest Gellner "The maid-servant in Victoria has all the pertness, the independence, the mode of asserting by her manner that though she brings you up your hot water, she is just as good as you—and a good deal better if she be younger—which is common to the American 'helps.' But in Victoria, as in the States, the offensiveness of this—for us who are old-fashioned it is in a certain degree offensive—is compensated by a certain intelligence and instinctive good-sense which convinces the observer that however much he may suffer, however heavily the young woman may tread upon his toes, she herself has a good time in the world. She is not degraded in her own estimation by her own employment, and has no idea of being humble because she brings you hot water. And when we consider that the young woman serves us for her own purposes, and not for ours, we cannot rationally condemn her. The spirit which has made this bearing so common in the United States—where indeed it is hardly so universal now as it used to be—has grown in Victoria and has permeated all classes. One has to look very closely before one can track it and trace it to be the same in the elegantly equipped daughter of the millionaire who leads the fashion in Melbourne, and in the little housemaid—but it is the same. The self-dependence, the early intelligence, the absence of reverence, the contempt for all weakness—even feminine weakness—the indifference to the claims of age, the bold self-assertion, have sprung both in the one class and in the other from the rapidity with which success in life has been gained." Anthony Trollope "The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers.' We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business." Clive Staples Lewis "Among a range of pre-literate peoples from the Zulus to the Tahitians, between 33 and 45 per cent of adult males were mobilised for combat in wartime. Among modern armies engaged in serious combat, only France in the First World War, where about 42 per cent of adult males were mobilised, rivalled or exceeded the figures for many pre-literate societies. Remarkably, neither Nazi Germany (33 per cent) nor the Soviet Union (23 per cent) mobilised as high a percentage of its male population for combat as was the case among the most warlike pre-literate tribes. Casualties in battle were also far higher than in modern wars, with casualties ranging up to 87-100 per cent killed among the losing side in conflicts where estimates can be made of the number of casualties. At one battle lost in 1857 among the Mohave-Yumas, 49.6 per cent of combatants were killed; in a great Aztec battle fought in 1478, 87.1 per cent of 24,000 combatants were killed, while 100 percent of combatants were killed during the Blackfoot Indian raid which annihilated the Assiniboins in 1849." William Rubinstein "Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts. Imprisonment physically removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them and subtracting the crimes they would have committed from the statistics. Incarceration is especially effective when a small number of individuals commit a large number of crimes. A classic study of criminal records in Philadelphia, for example, found that 6 percent of the young male population committed more than half the offenses. The people who commit the most crimes expose themselves to the most opportunities to get caught, and so they are the ones most likely to be skimmed off and sent to jail. Moreover, people who commit violent crimes get into trouble in other ways, because they tend to favor instant gratification over long-term benefits. They are more likely to drop out of school, quit work, get into accidents, provoke fights, engage in petty theft and vandalism, and abuse alcohol and drugs. A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as bycatch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets." Steven Pinker "Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries." David Hume "You could support different football teams but vote the same way. You could vote for different parties but agree about the best way to raise your children. You could disagree about child rearing but share a fear of the dark. You could be afraid of different things but love the same music. You could detest each other's musical taste but worship the same God." Salman Rushdie "It cannot be said too often—at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of." Eric Blair "Before the potato and maize, before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent with those today in Cameroon and Bangladesh; they were below Bolivia or Zimbabwe. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon. Industrial monoculture with improved crops and high-intensity fertilizer allowed billions of people—Europe first, and then much of the rest of the world—to escape the Malthusian trap. Incredibly, living standards doubled or tripled worldwide even as the planet's population climbed from fewer than 1 billion in 1700 to about 7 billion today." Charles Mann "Governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves." Albert Gallatin "We had insisted on the rifles being surrendered, and that expensive factor, Imperial prestige, demanded that we should prosecute operations till we got them, no matter what the cost might be. The rifles were worth little. The men and officers we lost were worth a great deal. It was unsound economics, but Imperialism and economics clash as often as honesty and self-interest." Winston Churchill "The effect of commerce is riches; the consequence of riches, luxury, and that of luxury the perfection of the arts." Charles-Louis de Secondat "Intimate conviction, needing support from nothing external, came to be seen as the true guide to political action. After the Napoleonic wars, a society of radical students, the Burschenschaft, was set up in the university of Jena to work for unity and democracy in Germany. One of its leaders preached that the righteous man recognizes no external law; once convinced that a course of action was right, he had unconditionally and uncompromisingly to realize the dictates of reason as revealed to him. Among the adepts this was known simply as 'the principle,' and those who followed it hence termed themselves the 'Unconditionals'; they took Jesus as their hero, for they considered him a martyr to conviction, and their association-song proclaimed: 'A Christ thou shalt become.' One of these students, Carl Sand, acquired the conviction that the writer, Kotzebue, was an enemy of the German people, and decided to kill him. Having done the deed, he left a paper by the side of his victim on which was inscribed: 'A Christ thou shalt become.' The inscription, of course, referred to Sand, not to his victim." Elie Kedourie "There is a parable—or maybe it's just part of a stand-up routine—that at the end of your life you are reunited with all the things that you have lost in your life. This lovely idea turns out be a terrible disappointment as you are faced with thousands and thousands of pens and umbrellas, each one a metaphor, I suppose, for the worthlessness of the things by which you set so much value. But it would be nice if, at the end of your life, the locations of where you lost your most beloved ten or twenty possessions could be revealed to you, if you could see a film that showed your younger self walking away from the table at the festival in Adelaide, slightly drunk, while the Freitag bag, discreetly stylish in grey, sat there neglected, unnoticed and mute, incapable of calling out 'Vergissmeinnicht.'" Geoff Dyer "It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilized men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves." Thomas Babington Macaulay "The young people sometimes make ardent professions of faith. Yet Boccaccio is not afraid of blasphemy—at one point, he refers to a man's erection as 'the resurrection of the flesh'—and there is almost nothing he insists on more than the corruption of the clergy. They are stupid and lazy. Your wives are not safe with them. They smell like goats. In one story, the merchant Giannotto di Civignì tries to get his Jewish friend Abraham to convert to Christianity. Abraham says that he must first go to Rome, to observe the clergy and see if they lead holy lives. This worries Giannotto. He fears that Abraham will discover how debauched the priests are. And that is exactly what happens. Abraham, returning home, reports that the Roman clergy are all sots, satyrs, and sodomites. Then he invites Giannotto to go with him to church, where he intends to be baptized. If the Roman church survives, he says, despite the debauchery of its representatives, then it must be endorsed by the Holy Spirit, and he wants to join the winning team." Joan Acocella "As far as I am concerned, the Palestinian mission is a mission of peace. I am sure that this is true for the vast majority of our people, the Palestine Liberation Organisation has symbolised both the loneliness of our vision and the wonderful power of our faith in it." Edward Said "It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle." Virginia Woolf "It is time we finally understood that our life is not simply unjust, but is primarily poor and squalid, and that the poverty-stricken cannot become rich if they devote all their attention to the equal distribution of their few pennies." Semyon Frank "These are the people that carry off the gross of your consumption. It is for these your markets are kept open late on Saturday nights, because they usually receive their week's wages late. It is by these the number of alehouses subsist, so many brewers get estates, and such a vast revenue of excise is raised, by these the vast quantity of meal and malt is consumed. And, in a word, these are the life of our whole commerce, and all by their multitude. Their numbers are not hundreds or thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but millions. It is by their multitude, I say, that all the wheels of trade are set on foot, the manufacture and produce of the land and sea, finished, cured and fitted for the markets abroad. It is by the largeness of their gettings that they are supported and by the largeness of their number the whole country is supported; by their wages they are able to live plentifully, and it is by their expensive, generous, free way of living, that the home consumption is raised to such a bulk, as well of our own, as of foreign production." Daniel Defoe "Most new products and new businesses fail, and most new scientific hypotheses turn out to be wrong. There is no shame in being wrong, and even the most successful operators in those fields make significant mistakes. The problem is not being wrong but rather persisting in wrongness—failing to get less wrong over time. Scientists and entrepreneurs may be individually arrogant, but both of their underlying models of operation depend upon openness to discovering that one's beliefs are wrong and taking action to correct them." Kevin Williamson "The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us." Fyodor Dostoevsky "If progress is the end, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, only recedes, and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes crying 'morituri te salutant,' can give back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth." Alexander Herzen "The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken or forgotten the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may at any time be passed by those intended to be restrained?" John Marshall "Kafka's repeated cries of self-disgust are striking, and frequently border on the hysterical. Writing to Milena Jesenská he offers one of his loveliest and most terrifying metaphors—'No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell—what we take to be the song of angels is their song'—but precedes it with a tortured admission—or is it a warped form of boasting?—'I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity.' And this from an obsessively fastidious teetotaler and semivegetarian whose elegant blue suits and spotless linen were so often commented upon by friends and acquaintances." John Banville "The best argument for the minimum wage is that our school system is a failure. So we have to do something to help people who have been abused and betrayed by the system. But the minimum wage is the wrong way to fix this failure. It's just an additional barrier to the least skilled workers of America making it harder for them to begin their careers. Do we really want to make it harder for the least-skilled with the fewest connections, the ones who desperately need that first job to start their career?" Russ Roberts "In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold." Charles Holland Duell