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"A person can cry or laugh. Always when you're crying you could be laughing, you have the choice. Crazy people know how to do this best because their minds are loose. So you can take the flexibility your mind is capable of and make it work for you." Andy Warhol   "The taste for making others submit to a way of life which one thinks more useful to them than they do themselves, is not a common taste in England." John Stuart Mill   "I think what frightens me most about marriage is the passing-a-law-never-to-be-alone-again side of it." Philip Larkin   "They no longer criticize the ruling class for utilizing the laws of property and religion to exploit the proletariat for the sake of surplus value; instead they criticize the 'merchants of kitsch' who are enmeshed in the machine of industrial civilization and who exploit not the labor but the emotional needs of the masses—these emotional needs themselves produced by industrial society. They no longer criticize modern society for the hard life which it imposes on the majority of its citizens. They criticize it for the uninteresting and vulgar life which it provides. They criticize the aesthetic qualities of a society which has realized so much of what Socialists once claimed was of central importance, which has, in other words, overcome poverty and long arduous labor." Edward Shils   "The horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew us into the war. A long period of law and order, such as our generation had behind it, produces a real craving for the abnormal, a craving that literature stimulates." Ernst Jünger   "The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion." Thomas Ernest Hulme   "We see life as it is when we have no part in it." Virginia Woolf   "Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named 'Mollycoddle'; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see, is there to be found a class or a clique of men, respected by others and respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit, including under business Politics and Law, which in this country are departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles, his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professional career; but that, it is agreed, is adopted only by men of 'no ambition.' Americans believe in education, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to be made in that profession, and the making of money is the test of character. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point which may easily discourage him from running at all." Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson   "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring." Simone Weil   "The rejoicing of the world is vanity. With great expectation is it hoped for and it cannot, when it comes, be held fast. For this day which is a day of rejoicing in this city to the lost, tomorrow will, of course, cease to be; nor will they themselves be the same tomorrow that they are today. And all things pass away, fly away, and vanish like smoke; and woe to those who love such things!" Augustine of Hippo   "The beautiful convenience of the German soul is that it enables one (like Goethe's caddish Faust) to commit a crime and yet feel ecstatic and romantic about it." Peter Viereck   "Honest, loyal and decent people—ordinary working men and women—have been and are being dismissed because they are unwilling to join a trade union, even when they have been with their firm for twenty years, even when it was not a condition of employment to be a trade unionist when they started work. Other non-Unionists may be made redundant out of turn. There are elaborate laws against unfair dismissal. But in a recent Tribunal decision it was ruled that non-Unionists need not be considered equal with other workers. In this instance, the worker concerned was the first to lose his job although he had been with the firm longer than other men who stayed on. In the end, the real case against Socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality. There is nothing pure about the motives of people who want to boss your lives. Socialism is a system designed to enlarge the power of those people to the point where they control everyone and everything." Margaret Thatcher   "The greatness of an epoch or a cause depends on the proportion of those capable of sacrifice, on whatever side it may be. In this respect the Middle Ages pass muster rather well. Devotion! And not a guarantee of regular pay!" Jacob Burckhardt   "In the worst case, climate change could cut crop yields in Africa in half. Yet yields would increase tenfold—in the same climate, on the same soil—if subsistence farmers started using crops and techniques pioneered on experimental farms. Climate change may be a big issue in Africa. But it is not nearly as important as lack of tenure, poor roads, roving warlords and so on." Richard Tol   "What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet." John Keats   "The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manner of the times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals: in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and indecisive contests. If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions." Edward Gibbon   "There is no development policy, no feasible amount of foreign aid, no poundage of fair trade coffee that will help someone from a developing country to a better life more than opening the door to a better economy, instantly doubling or tripling the value of their labor." Kerry Howley   "Socialism, in truth, consists, when finally resolved, not in getting at all, but in giving; not in being served, but in serving; not in selfishness, but in unselfishness; not in the desire to gain a place of bliss in this world for one's self and one's family (that is the individualist and capitalist aim), but in the desire to create an earthly paradise for all." John Bruce Glasier   "Killing somebody must be the greatest pleasure in existence. Either like killing yourself without being interfered with by the instinct of self-preservation—or exterminating the instinct of self-preservation itself." Wyndham Lewis   "If you're talking about revolution, if you're talking about identifying with the Vietnamese struggle, if you're talking about supporting German students, you don't need to go to Rockefeller Center, dig? You don't need to go marching downtown. There's one oppressor—in the White House, in Low Library, in Albany, New York. You strike a blow at the gym, you strike a blow for the Vietnamese people. You strike a blow at the gym and you strike a blow against the assassin of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. You strike a blow at Low Library and you strike a blow for the freedom fighters in Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea, Zimbabwe, South Africa." Bill Sales   "Just as the human being is born in pain, so too his best spiritual creations come through great suffering and pain. The pain that he has gone through becomes a blessing for his fellow human beings. The surroundings in which these spiritual heroes lived were plain and simple. They built their temples within themselves. One cannot imagine the man who could conceive and express Faust in the midst of the comforts of modern life." Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke   "To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future." Christian Morgenstern   "The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it's a shame that England and America didn't let Germany conquer Europe." Scott Fitzgerald   "England will soon have to establish old folks' homes for its children, most likely. It unsexes its people with sports and fixed ideas; if Germany hadn't kept it in a state of perpetual uneasiness, it would have turned to pederasty in a couple of generations." Knut Hamsun   "This government, rooted in opposition to rationalism, is well aware of the nameless longing of the Volk it governs, of their dreams that sway between heaven and earth, which can be explained and expressed only by the artist." Hans Blunck   "The commonplace middle-class liberalism which dates from Tom Paine's rights of man, and ends with Mill's rights of women, is now symmetrical and complete. It is at once the child and the patron of that extraordinary form of civilization which we have developed, which neither feels nor excites enthusiasm, which is without faith or even capacity for happiness, the scene of a tumultuous activity and bustling energy which begins and ends with doing and getting." Herbert Cowell   "In 1647, the Levellers drew up the first of three Agreements of the People, according to which Parliament was to be limited by fundamental law which was unalterable. Under the terms of the first Agreement, Parliament could not legislate against the freedom of religion, it could not exempt anyone from the due process of the law, it could not abridge the freedom to trade abroad, and it could not impose the death penalty except for murder. Above all, perhaps, it could not abolish trial by jury. The third Agreement of the People, drawn up in 1653, went further and declared that 'all laws made, or that shall be made contrary to any part of this Agreement, are thereby made null and void.' This third Agreement can perhaps justifiably be regarded as the first written constitution in modern European history." Vernon Bogdanor   "Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors because they are a burden on production and are paid through production. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, in tax-sold farms, and in hordes of hungry people, tramping the streets and seeking jobs in vain." Franklin Roosevelt   "As The New Statesman explained in July 1931: 'The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.' Karl Pearson was a socialist as well as pioneering eugenicist. The Webbs supported eugenic planning just as fervently as town planning. George Bernard Shaw believed that 'the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.' The young Bertrand Russell argued that the state should provide everyone with coloured 'procreation tickets,' and impose a heavy fine on people who chose to breed with the possessors of incompatible tickets. Harold Laski studied eugenics under Pearson, charmed the elderly Galton, who entertained him to tea and pronounced him a prodigy, and, as an Oxford undergraduate, founded the Galton Club. Throughout his career he argued that only eugenics would prevent the unfit from swamping the fit. J.B.S. Haldane contributed his name, money and sperm to the cause of eugenics." Adrian Wooldridge   "What do you think happens to people who aren't artists? What do you think people who aren't artists become?" Edward Estlin Cummings