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"During the 1990s, a staggering 150 million farmers fled the impoverished interior for factories near the coast, effectively creating a new Chicago every year. Moving to a city typically raised a worker's income by 50 percent, and because the new urbanites still needed to eat, those who stayed on the farm and sold food to the cities also saw wages rise by 6 percent per year. By 2006, China's economy was nine times bigger than it had been when Mao died thirty years earlier." Ian Morris   "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Karl Marx   "At the risk of oversimplifying the currents of 1967: There were tensions galore between the radical idea of political strategy—with discipline, organization, commitment to results out there at a distance—and the countercultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself, or for the part of the universe embodied in oneself, or for the community of the enlightened who were capable of loving one another—and the rest of the world be damned (which it was already)." Todd Gitlin   "Poor Africans grow up physically malnourished. They have little exposure to sober bourgeois habits—even in school. Once they enter the labor market, their prospects are grim unless they somehow escape to the First World. Poor Americans, in contrast, are almost never hungry. Their teachers expose them to the bourgeois way of life. And in the labor market, poor Americans earn incomes that poor African migrants bet their lives to enjoy." Bryan Caplan   "Observe, my Lord, I pray you, that grand error upon which all artificial legislative power is founded. It was observed that men had ungovernable passions, which made it necessary to guard against the violence they might offer to each other. They appointed governors over them for this reason; but a worse and more perplexing difficulty arises, how to be defended against the governors?" Edmund Burke   "It is only if we place ourselves before the alternatives of the past, as of the present, only if we live for a moment, as the men of the time lived, in its still fluid context and among its still unresolved problems, if we see these problems coming upon us, as well as look back on them after they have gone away, that we can draw useful lessons from history." Hugh Trevor-Roper   "I know that among all that class of persons who consider themselves to be par excellence the wise and the practical, it is esteemed a proof of consummate judgement to despair of doing good. I know that it is thought essential to a man who has any knowledge of the world to have an extremely bad opinion of it, and that whenever there are two ways of explaining any fact, wise and practical people always take that way which attributes most folly or most immorality to the mass of mankind." John Stuart Mill   "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building." Mark Rudd   "Of the three forms of sovereignty, democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and indeed against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people; and this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself, and thus also with freedom." Immanuel Kant   "We have accepted in silence chewing gum and Cecil B. de Mille, the Reader's Digest and bebop. Coca-Cola seems to be the Danzig of European culture. After Coca-Cola, enough." Robert Escarpit   "To the eighteenth-century liberal, to the old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberal, that is to say to all professed liberals, brought up to be against the government on principle, this organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps, too, the individualist would see it in that light. But these are only the mental habits acquired in an evil time. The old liberalism assumed bad government, the more powerful the government the worse it was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness of the free individual." Herbert George Wells   "State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. In this branch, therefore, read good books, because they will encourage, as well as direct your feelings. The writings of Sterne, particularly, form the best course of morality that ever was written." Thomas Jefferson   "We are all of us fond of low-effort thought. Just look at what people share on Facebook and Twitter. We like studies and facts that confirm what we already believe, especially when what we believe is that we are nicer, smarter and more rational than other people." Megan McArdle   "Derogatory phrases like 'the servitude of maternity,' 'woman's absurd fertility,' the 'exhausting servitude' of breast-feeding, abound. (How could they not, since the author sees heterosexual love in general as 'a mortal danger?') According to Beauvoir, a girl's first menstruation, which many of us welcomed with excitement and pride, is met instead with 'disgust and fear.' It 'inspires horror' and 'signifies illness, suffering and death.' Beauvoir doesn't appear to have spent much time with children or teenagers: a first menses, in her view, leads the girl to be 'disgusted by her too-carnal body, by menstrual blood, by adults' sexual practices, by the male she is destined for.'" Francine du Plessix Gray   "Unless the course of love is being hindered there is no 'romance'; and it is romance that we revel in—that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations, and delays of passion, together with its climax rising to disaster—not its sudden flaring. Consider our literature. The happiness of lovers stirs our feelings only on account of the unhappiness which lies in wait for it. We must feel that life is imperilled, and also feel the hostile realities that drive happiness away into some beyond. What moves us is not its presence, but its nostalgia and recollection. Presence is inexpressible and has no perceptible duration; it can only be a moment of grace—as in the duet of Don Giovanni and Zerlina. Otherwise we lapse into a picture-postcard idyll. Happy love has no history—in European literature." Denis de Rougemont   "This was the pyrrhic victory of Weimar foreign policy: the moment Germany's external war debt—notionally worth around $77 billion in 1931—was effectively cancelled at the expense of her former enemies. Considering that the total value of reparations actually paid by Germany cannot have exceeded $4.5 billion dollars, the conclusion seems clear. What hyperinflation did for the war debt, the depression did for the external burden imposed in the form of reparations. Having fought the First World War on the cheap, the German Reich ultimately succeeded in avoiding paying but a fraction of the war's financial cost." Niall Ferguson   "All things are sold: the very light of Heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of undisguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign." Percy Bysshe Shelley   "No cause indeed has perhaps more promoted, in every respect, the general prosperity of the United States, than the absence of those systems of internal restrictions and monopoly which continue to disfigure the state of society in other countries. No laws exist here directly or indirectly confining man to a particular occupation or place, or excluding any citizen from any branch he may at any time think proper to pursue. Industry is in every respect perfectly free and unfettered; every species of trade, commerce, art, profession, and manufacture, being equally opened to all, without requiring any previous regular apprenticeship, admission, or license. Hence the progress of America has not been confined to the improvement of her agriculture, and to the rapid formation of new settlements and states in the wilderness, but her citizens have extended their commerce through every part of the globe, and carry on with complete success even those branches for which a monopoly had heretofore been considered essentially necessary." Albert Gallatin   "There are two sorts of corruptions—one when the people do not observe the laws; the other when they are corrupted by the laws; an incurable evil, because it is the very remedy itself." Charles-Louis de Secondat   "Intellectuals who are highly critical of any risks associated with particular pharmaceutical drugs and consider it the government's duty to ban some of these drugs because of risks of death, see no need for the government to ban sky-diving or white-water rafting, even if the latter represent higher risks of death for the sake of recreation than the risks from medicines that can stave off pain or disability, or which may save more lives that they cost. Similarly, when a boxer dies from a beating in the ring, that is almost certain to set off demands in the media or among the intelligentsia that boxing be banned, but no such demands are likely to follow deaths from skiing accidents, even if these are far more common than deaths from boxing. Again, it is not the principle but the attitude." Thomas Sowell   "A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions. I am sure that liberty, so incorporated, and in a manner identified with justice, must be infinitely dear to everyone who is capable of conceiving what it is. But whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe." Edmund Burke   "The crucial freedom is freedom to dissent; and this requires freedom of exit if the dissenting party cannot persuade those who are unable to abide by the dissenting ideas or practices to find them less harmful or offensive. Differences, in the end, are just that: differences. And while there are occasions when they can be reconciled, the relevant question is what is to be done when this is not possible. The answer is that the differing parties must have a way out. One other answer—that the will of the stronger should prevail—must be rejected. Another answer sometimes offered is that the party of right should prevail; but that answer has to be dismissed: first because it begs the question, since the question of right is what is in dispute; and second because the power to enforce right would always lie with the stronger, in which case right and power would become one (for one could not expect the stronger to enforce what it did not take to be right—as Rousseau saw most clearly)." Chandran Kukathas   "Perhaps the greatest principle in politics is that people love to be frightened." Michael Oakeshott   "The Scottish theorists were very much aware of how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested upon man's more primitive and ferocious instincts being tamed and checked by institutions that he neither had designed nor could control. They were very far from holding such naive views, later unjustly laid at the door of their liberalism, as the 'natural goodness of man,' the existence of 'a natural harmony of interests,' or the beneficent effects of 'natural liberty' (even though they did sometimes use the last phrase). They knew that it required the artifices of institutions and traditions to reconcile the conflicts of interest. Their problem was 'that universal mover in human nature, self love, may receive such direction in this case (as in all others) as to promote the public interest by those efforts it shall make towards pursuing its own.' It was not 'natural liberty' in any literal sense, but the institutions evolved to secure 'life, liberty, and property,' which made these individual efforts beneficial." Friedrich Hayek   "Large, politically complex societies emerged only after—or as a consequence of—the replacement of kinship institutions and nepotism by other institutions, by what Hobbes called the power that keeps men in awe, namely, the political state and law. That is also why almost all early anthropologists were lawyers or were interested in the development of law from vague customs. They were appropriately astonished by the obvious fact that most of the peoples in the newly discovered worlds of central Africa, Polynesia, Melanesia, Australia, and the Americas lacked what we have come to know as the political state and the law." Napoleon Chagnon   "There is nothing wrong with the literature of personal experience and the feelings; that indeed is what most literature has always concerned itself with. And it is difficult for a writer to come to grips imaginatively with the political element in life. Finally, institutions may well be both corrupt and corrupting. But none of these considerations proves a priori that literature cannot tackle a political subject, or that it cannot be successful, which is to say convincing to the reader, in doing so. And the task Virgil set for himself in the Aeneid was to write literature about institutions and the political vocation." Douglas Stewart   "What Hitler said at Nuremberg is true. The Germans will resist to the death every invader of their own country, but they have no longer the desire themselves to invade any other land." David Lloyd George   "The theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith's basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits (in modern terms, for the transmission of their genes to future generations through differential success in reproduction)." Stephen Jay Gould