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"Neither the Congressional Budget Office nor anyone else can predict the consequences of a given tax rate increase or decrease. It is not just that the exact amount of revenue cannot be predicted. Whether revenue will move in one direction or in the opposite direction is not a foregone conclusion. The choice is among alternative educated guesses—or, what is worse, mechanically calculating how much revenue will come in if no one's behavior changes in the wake of a tax change. Behavior has changed too often, and too dramatically, to proceed on that assumption. As far back as 1933, John Maynard Keynes observed that 'taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,' and that, 'given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the Budget.'" Thomas Sowell   "It seems to me that the radical middle classes in England are the salt of the earth. Practically everything that we value seems to me to have been won by their efforts." Malcolm Bradbury   "In the first place, evolution in our sense of the word—that is, evolution towards democracy—is not only not inevitable, but it is the most precarious, difficult and exigent task political man has ever conceived. And, in the second place, far from it being the predestined path of every nation and race, only one or two nations have attempted to pursue it, while the rest deliberately and even, we might say, intelligently, pursue another path altogether as if that were progress, and are thus sincerely hostile to our own." Thomas Ernest Hulme   "There is a scientific name for people with an especially accurate perception of how talented, attractive, and popular they are—we call them clinically depressed." Megan McArdle   "Giving a 'lower-class education' can only mean giving no education at all, and this, one would suppose, can be done better on the street than in school. If, for example, it is pointless to try to teach the child correct English, it is pointless to try to teach him English at all. The only system that will not favor the child at the upper end of the class-cultural scale is one that frees the lower-class child from having to go to school at all. All education favors the middle- and upper-class child, because to be middle- or upper-class is to have qualities that make one particularly educable." Edward Banfield   "Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with petty interests, in one word so unpoetic, as the life of a man in the United States." Alexis de Tocqueville   "If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less right in himself than one of his neighbors or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable and for the preservation of which our government has been charged. Nothing could so completely divest us of that liberty as the establishment of the opinion that the state has a perpetual right to the services of all its members. This to men of certain ways of thinking would be to annihilate the blessing of existence; to contradict the giver of life who gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness; and certainly to such it were better that they had never been born." Thomas Jefferson   "The best photographers are the best liars." Norman Parkinson   "Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill. Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses. There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn't add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn't charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste. You'd have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you'd end up spending more." John Cochrane   "If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it." George Bernard Shaw   "In Wilde the artist revolted not against society but against life. Instead of having passions the artist had sensations, but even these in an abstracted, contemplative way. Whistler, in many things Wilde's mentor, had said that to ask the artist to paint life was like telling the player to sit on the piano. Wilde went a step further; to ask a man to live life was also an impertinence. No, 'the first duty in life is to assume a pose; what the second is no one yet has found out.' The pose is that manner which takes one furthest away from the passion and brutality of life. 'Create yourself; be yourself your poem.' 'I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.' No doubt the attitude was an overstatement, but it was a systematic one, with deep roots in the life of a man who went to court to prove that his conventional pose of respectability was true even though he knew it was not." Richard Ellmann   "If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself." Michel de Montaigne   "We cannot blame our young men when they prefer the safe, salaried position to the risk of enterprise after they have heard from their earliest youth the former described as the superior, more unselfish and disinterested occupation. The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which, in school and press, the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable." Friedrich Hayek   "One of the more surprising outcomes of the nineteenth century was that there was no war between Britain and France after 1815. It corroborates the truism that arms races do not invariably cause conflict—and indeed that they might even deter it." Hew Strachan   "Every dollar authorized in this bill was contained in the budget request that I sent to the Congress last January. Every dollar spent will result in savings to the country and especially to the local taxpayers in the cost of crime, welfare, of health, and of police protection. We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief rolls or welfare rolls. We want to offer the forgotten fifth of our people opportunity and not doles. That is what this measure does for our times. Our American answer to poverty is not to make the poor more secure in their poverty but to reach down and to help them lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty and move with the large majority along the high road of hope and prosperity. The days of the dole in our country are numbered. I firmly believe that as of this moment a new day of opportunity is dawning and a new era of progress is opening for us all." Lyndon Johnson   "Throughout the nineteenth century the rising majority called for equality, responsibility, energy; the dandy stood for superiority, irresponsibility, inactivity." Ellen Moers   "Those who bore others are the plebians, the crowd, the endless train of humanity in general; those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility. How remarkable it is that those who do not bore themselves generally bore others; those, however, who bore themselves entertain others. Generally, those who do not bore themselves are busy in the world in one way or another, but for that very reason they are, of all people, the most boring of all, the most unbearable." Soren Kierkegaard   "Eric Hobsbawm is decidedly a man of order, a 'Tory communist,' as he puts it. Communist intellectuals were never 'cultural dissidents'; and Hobsbawm's scorn for self-indulgent, post-anything 'leftism' has a long Leninist pedigree. But in his case there is another tradition at work. When Hobsbawm scornfully dismisses Thatcherism as 'the anarchism of the lower middle class,' he is neatly combining two anathemas: the old Marxist abhorrence of disorderly, unregulated self-indulgence; and the even older disdain of the English administrative elite for the uncultivated, socially insecure but economically ambitious service class of clerks and salesmen, formerly Mr Pooter, now Essex Man. Eric Hobsbawm, in short, is a mandarin—a Communist mandarin—with all the confidence and prejudices of his caste." Tony Judt   "The vigorous efforts of a society of merchants, attentive only to commercial objects, could not fail of diffusing new and more liberal ideas concerning justice and order in every country of Europe where they settled." William Robertson   "The devastation of the earth can easily go along with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men." Martin Heidegger   "The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact." Oscar Wilde   "The 'market' or market organization is not a means toward the accomplishment of anything. It is, indeed, the institutional embodiment of the voluntary exchange processes that are entered into by individuals in their several capacities. This is all that there is to it. Individuals are observed to co-operate with one another, to reach agreements, to trade. The network of relationships that emerges or evolves out of this trading process, the institutional framework, is called 'the market.' It is a setting, an arena, in which we, as economists, as theorists (as 'onlookers'), observe men attempting to accomplish their own purposes, whatever these may be." James Buchanan   "The war had entered into us like wine. We had set out in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes. The war was our dream of greatness, power and glory. It was a man's work, a duel on fields whose flowers would be stained with blood." Ernst Jünger   "Government, like dress, is the badge of our lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least." Tom Paine   "Is there anything absolutely useful on this earth and in this life of ours? To begin with, there is mighty little use in our being on this earth and living. I challenge the wisest of the company to tell us what we are good for unless it be not to subscribe to the Constitutionnel or any other paper." Theophile Gautier   "At the age of fourteen I had experienced a miracle. I turned on a tap, and clean water came gushing out. This was in the kitchen of my father's studio apartment in Jackson Heights. It had never happened to me before. In Bombay, the tap, when it worked, was always the first step of a process. The water came out in raw form; things had to be done to it. First it was filtered through a thin cloth to remove visible heavy dirt. It was further filtered in a large white receptacle with candle filters. Then it might be boiled, especially in the rainy season. Finally it would be put in empty whisky bottles and chilled in the refrigerator or, in my grandparents' house, in the big clay pots that cooled it and gave it a delicious sweet taste. It took a long time, at least twenty-four hours, between the time the water came out of the tap and the time it could enter my mouth. I had grown up drinking stale water." Suketu Mehta   "Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything." Albert Camus   "If art does not enlarge man's sympathies, it does nothing morally, and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is, that those who read them should be better able to imagine and feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures." Mary Ann Evans   "Of all the causes which conspire to produce the disappointment of those glowing hopes with which married life is usually entered upon, none is so potent as this supremacy of sex—this degradation of what should be a free and equal relationship into one of ruler and subject—this supplanting of the sway of affection by the sway of authority. Only as that condition of slavery to which women are condemned amongst barbarous nations is ameliorated, does ideal love become possible; and only when that condition of slavery shall have been wholly abolished, will ideal love attain fullness and permanence." Herbert Spencer   "When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction." Philip Roth