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"Just before the outbreak of war Lerchenfeld summed up the thinking of the generals as follows: 'Military circles here are in very good spirits. The Chief of General Staff von Moltke declared, some months ago now, that the present moment is militarily more favourable than it can ever be again in the foreseeable future.' In justification Moltke cited Germany's superiority in terms of artillery and infantry weaponry and shortcomings in the training of French recruits in recent years owing to the reintroduction of the three-year service. Significantly, Lerchenfeld made no mention of the attitude of Great Britain in a European war; whereas in fact, the most serious miscalculation on the eve of the great catastrophe was the notion that Germany could launch an offensive war against France and Russia without having to fear the intervention of the British Empire." John Röhl   "Professors who have risen to positions of eminence by writing dull, solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the profession, teach graduate students to write dull, solid, valuable monographs like theirs; the road to academic security is that of writing dull, solid, valuable monographs." Samuel Eliot Morison   "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." Walter Benjamin   "I certainly have very warm, good wishes for the place of my birth. But the sphere of my duties is my true country." Edmund Burke   "A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men." Camille Paglia   "In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of woman; he slays the dragon, he battles giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits." Simone de Beauvoir   "The emphasis of Nazism was not on the past but on 'breaking out' to the future—Aufbruch was one of the movement's prized words, capturing the notion of eruption, the exuberant eruption of life that comes with the awakening of spring. One spoke of the 'eruption of the nation,' the 'eruption of spirit.' Just as the overriding theme of Die Meistersinger—according to Hanfstaengl, Hitler's favorite opera—is the awakening of life and art that comes with spring, so too was that of Nazism." Modris Eksteins   "The Americans constitute a genuine danger for France. It is a very different danger from that which Germany represents and from that which Germany represents and from what the Russians might eventually pose for us. The Americans could prevent us from carrying out the obligatory revolution and their materialism does not even have the tragic grandeur of the materialism of the totalitarians. While they make a veritable cult of the idea of liberty, they do not for a minute feel any need to liberate themselves from a capitalism more dominant among them than anywhere else. It seems that overindulgence in well-being has diminished the vital force among them in a disquieting way." Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac   "If politics is a science, then it is a kind of geology." Ferdinand Mount   "We must never make hypotheses; we must never say: Let us begin by inventing principles according to which we attempt to explain everything. We should say rather: Let us make an exact analysis of things." François-Marie Arouet   "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." John Broadus Watson   "Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence." Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur   "It is not shared experiences, but shared genetics, that make siblings resemble one another. Indeed, with regard to psychological development, environment makes siblings no more similar to one another than to children picked at random from the general population." Robert Plomin   "Paris is full of people who don't want to hear any mention of freedom of commerce. They say it will lead to freedom of thought. They are wrong; on the contrary, it will be one of the fruits of freedom to think and to write. They also say that restrictions are not harmful to everyone; and that without the exclusive privileges which they establish, five or six million peasants would perhaps enjoy a far better soup, and a million proprietors fewer debts and difficulties, but that it would necessitate dismantling two hundred coaches that now circulate in Paris. It would be a good thing to do away with another three hundred if one were engaged in enriching the king by a form of taxation that would not ruin the people. Counting four horses, a master, and three servants per equipage, and adding them all together, you see, Monsieur, four thousand powerful animals, ready to be my enemies. It doesn't take nearly that many to persecute and destroy a poor man." Pierre Samuel du Pont   "A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles." Joseph Addison   "Our military men had, as I had long been aware, only one plan of campaign." Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg   "I wanted to write such a lot—novels particularly—about 'the way things turn out and the beauty of the natural world'; but it doesn't look as if I shall: and I wanted to do it not for my sake but for its sake—responsibility is always to the thing and not to yourself, and not to the filthy reader. I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not." Philip Larkin   "As far as the financial and economic situation is concerned, I have always laid great stress on the importance of America's entrance into the war. But from a military point of view, her entrance means nothing. I repeat: from a military point of view America is as nothing. I am convinced that almost no Americans will volunteer for war service. That is shown by the lack of volunteers for the conflict with Mexico. And even if many enlist, they must first be trained. This will take time, for America has neither commissioned nor noncommissioned officers enough to train large bodies of troops. And when the men have been trained, how are they to cross the ocean?" Eduard von Capelle   "No man ecclesiastical or temporal shall be examined upon secret thoughts of his heart, or of his secret opinion: but something ought to be objected against him what he hath spoken or done." Edward Coke   "With the most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to acquire talents superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his power, and which if in the extremity of old age, he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it." Adam Smith   "We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statutes mean." Oliver Wendell Holmes   "Tocqueville summed up the middle class and the commercial spirit as 'moderate in all things, except in the taste for material well-being, and mediocre.' For aristocratic liberalism, mediocrity was characteristic of the middle class, of democratic society, and thus of the nineteenth century. Under the dominion of middle-class public opinion, 'the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.' Indeed, the natural effect of democracy was to 'give everyone the desire of changing places without suggesting to anyone the idea of going much farther; to make personal ambition a universal feeling and to diminish the number of great ambitions,' a tendency that was encouraged by the increasing specialization of modern life." Alan Kahan   "I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don't mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilization, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to." Wystan Hugh Auden   "Every eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolution had at least declared the rights of the person to be the centerpiece of society and had sought to draw a line beyond which the state could not reach into the individual's life. Now only the state has rights and powers, and the person, like his property, belongs to the collective, with no recourse or appeal if fools or factions should decide on his ruin." Arthur Miller   "Even that which in the concrete world can never be victorious remains in that other as a dynamic force, and unfulfilled ideals often prove the most unconquerable. An idea which does not take on material shape is not necessarily a conquered idea or a false idea; it may represent a need which, though its gratification be postponed, is and remains a need. Nay, more: An ideal which, because it has failed to secure embodiment in action, is neither worn out nor compromised in any way, continues to work as a ferment in subsequent generations, urging them to the achievement of a higher morality. Those ideals only which have failed to put on concrete form are capable of everlasting resurrection." Stefan Zweig   "It may be the function of the Church to lead people to a purely disinterested virtue (though this is at least debatable); a statesman who supposes that a mass of citizens can be governed without appeal to their self-interest is living in a dreamland and is a public menace. The art of government in fact is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands." William Temple   "Good institutions are those which most effectively denature man, depriving him of his absolute existence in return for a relative one and transferring his sense of identity to the community. In this way, each individual no longer believes himself to be single, but part of a unit and is aware only of the whole. A Roman citizen was neither Caius nor Lucius: he was a Roman." Jean-Jacques Rousseau   "Businesses channel their natural competitive zeal into establishing close ties with the political and bureaucratic authorities instead of into a contest to serve consumers better. Established business owners fight to maintain the privileged situation they have managed to achieve over the years, while new owners, who also want a slice of the pie, fight to win partial advantages through political participation. A legal system whose sole purpose is redistribution thus benefits neither rich nor poor, but only those best organized to establish close ties with the people in power. It ensures that the businesses that remain in the market are those which are most efficient politically, not economically." Hernando de Soto   "The man who doesn't become famous is no more than wood smoke in the wind or foam upon the sea." Leonardo da Vinci   "We live in an age that is simultaneously romantic and steel-like, that has not lost its depth of feeling, but also discovers a new romanticism in the results of modern inventions and technology. While bourgeois reaction was alien to and filled with incomprehension, if not outright hostility to technology, and while modern skeptics believed the deepest roots of the collapse of European culture lay in it, National Socialism understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time." Joseph Goebbels