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"If this were the place to go into details, I would observe to what extent this universal desire for reputation, honours and promotion which devours us all, activates and compares talents and strengths, how it excites and multiplies passions, and how, in making all men competitors, rivals or rather enemies, it causes every day failures, successes and catastrophes of every sort by making so many contenders run the same course; I would show that this burning desire to be talked about, this yearning for distinction, which almost always keeps us in a restless state, is responsible for what is best and worst among men, for our virtues and our vices, for our sciences and our mistakes, for our conquerors and our philosophers; responsible, in short, for a multitude of bad things and a very few good ones." Jean-Jacques Rousseau   "To invoke The Revolution was to claim title to the future; to see beyond raids and trials and wiretaps and empire and war and guilt; to justify the tedium of mimeographing one more leaflet, working out one more position, suffering through one more insufferable meeting. The Revolution: The name of our desire became firm and precise—never mind the absence of a vision of reconstruction—by dint of the definite article. Through the magic of a phrase, the students and lumpen-proletarians of this unprecedented 'post-scarcity' society were joined to Parisian communards of 1871 and Muscovite workers of 1917 and Vietnamese peasants (and Parisian students) of 1968. To speak of The Revolution was automatically to acquire a pedigree, heroes, martyrs, allies, texts, and therefore anchorage—no mean achievement for this unmoored movement floundering around in an unfathomably rich and violent America." Todd Gitlin   "Who was it that referred to the enormous condescension of posterity? We would do better to bear in mind Montaigne's admonition: 'It is a dangerous and consequential rashness, beside the absurd temerity that it entails, to despise that which we cannot conceive.'" Eugen Weber   "The human capacity to think provisionally, to do thought-experiments, to form hypotheses, to imagine what may happen before it happens—is fundamental to our nature and to our spectacular biological success (so far). I think the cleverest thing Sir Karl Popper ever said was his remark that our hypotheses 'die in our stead.' The human race has found a way, if not to abolish, then to defer and diminish the Darwinian treadmill of death. We send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them fall. It is easy to see how the human imagination might begin to exhibit a need, in art, for a death-game, a game in which the muscles of psychic response, fear and pity, are exercised and made ready, through a facing of the worst, which is not yet the real worst." Anthony Nuttall   "War is a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers. The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace an element of civil corruption?" Thomas Mann   "According to Robert Ley, head of the Labour Front, prior to National Socialism workers had been systematically convinced that their activities served no higher purpose, that their labour was only a commodity, that they were proletarians. Beauty of Labour would return to the worker 'the feeling for the worth and importance of his labour.' Albert Speer, the bureau's director, envisioned the emergence of 'a new face of the German workplace' and a new epoch that no longer considered factory architecture inferior. In the past degraded to a 'joyless compulsion,' labour itself would now give way to 'a new spirit,' manifested in the 'new formation of the environment.'" Anson Rabinbach   "To expect self-denial from men when they have a majority in their favor, and consequently power to gratify themselves, is to disbelieve all history and universal experience; it is to disbelieve Revelation and the Word of God, which informs us the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." John Adams   "Nothing American escaped this enormous wave of anger. And when the long list of Yankee crimes against humanity had been completely covered, Roger Vailland still found time to settle the score with Jayne Mansfield, 'the dream of some drunk Puritan at the tail end of an electoral banquet in the Midwest.' The Communist (and libertine) novelist was no less unfriendly toward the Frigidaire, upon which he heaped the same scorn as André Maurois's 'old friend': 'In a country like France where, aside from two months out of the year and not every year, it is always cold enough to put a cooler out on the windowsill and keep until Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday the leftovers from Sunday's leg of lamb,' the ostentatious refrigerator, essentially destined to provide ice cubes for Yankee beverages, was nothing but a 'symbol' or rather a 'ploy,' and the artificially aroused need for it aggravated the worker's alienation. Men in general and specifically Communist men should be wary of the 'barbarity of comfort.'" Philippe Roger   "If men would suffer one another to go to heaven each his own way, and not out of a fond conceit of themselves pretend to greater knowledge and care of one another's soul and eternal contentments than he himself, this might indeed promote a quiet in the world, and at last bring those glorious days that men have a great while sought after the wrong way." John Locke   "The separation of the province of distributing justice between man and man from that of conducting affairs and leading armies, is the great advantage which modern times have over ancient, and the foundation of that greater security which we now enjoy, both with regard to liberty, property, and life. It was introduced only by chance to ease the supreme magistrate of the most laborious and the least glorious part of his power, and has never taken place until the increase of refinement and the growth of society have multiplied business immensely." Adam Smith   "Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will." Immanuel Kant   "The physicist who is only a physicist can still be a first-class physicist and a most valuable member of society. But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist. And I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.” Friedrich Hayek   "It is not property, which for Jane Austen always carried distinct responsibilities and patterns of behaviour with it—or should do. Unlike money, property supplied a specific agenda of duties, actions and rewards. The danger of money, on the other hand, was that not only did it not provide any pedigree: it conferred no specific obligations. Always 'circulating,' it was as uncertain in origin as it was indeterminate in application. It embodied no entelechy and was teleologically morally neutral—and indifferent. Anyone could be a 'do-anything' with it. Emma is unique among Jane Austen's heroines in that she is rich enough to think that she does not need a marriage with a proper man—with property—in order to exist properly in society. Marriage is a game she can play with other people. Her apparent freedom based on financial independence is thus not only deeply ambiguous but carries with it a latent double danger: she can delude herself and she can toy and tamper with other peoples' relationships. She of course does both." Tony Tanner   "First, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up together or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins are no more similar than one would expect from the effects of their shared genes." Steven Pinker   "Everything the knight and princess do betrays that they act in virtue of a necessity they are unaware of—and that perhaps the author has been unaware of too—but that is stronger than the need of their happiness. Objectively, not one of the barriers to the fulfilment of their love is insuperable, and yet each time they give up. It is not too much to say that they never miss a chance of getting parted. When there is no obstruction, they invent one, as in the case of the drawn sword and of Tristan's marriage. They invent obstructions as if on purpose, notwithstanding that such barriers are their bane. Can it be in order to please author and reader? It is all one; for the demon of courtly love which prompts the lovers in their inmost selves to the devices that are the cause of their pain is the very demon of the novel as we in the West like it to be." Denis de Rougemont   "Regulatory bodies, like other organisms, shy away from negative stimuli. That's why the FDA tends to slow-walk the approval process unless some loud advocacy group is on their tail: A drug that could have saved lives but fails to get approval costs them little, while another thalidomide would be personally disastrous for those who approved it. It's why OSHA nitpicks small businesses over trivia—better millions of man-hours lost on elusive safety goals rather than one worker who managed to get dismembered on a job site without an OSHA warning registered against it. For a banking regulator, unless there's a financial crisis, the worst negative stimuli is likely to come from angry bankers, not consumers who are outraged about the decision to let Goldman Sachs hold some Santander Brasil stock for a while. This is one big reason that agencies that start out as fierce hawks intent on putting industry in their place end up as docile partners helping the incumbents shut out new competition. Over time, whatever public outcry gave rise to the agency fades away. But the industry is still focused on the regulators with the intensity of one of those super-lasers they use to create unnatural elements, 365 days a year." Megan McArdle   "Sure, it's possible to be inspired by the great dinner ideas on Goop or the excellent examples set by other parents online. Personally, though, I don't want to read about amazing kid-friendly boutique hotels with treehouse cabins in Sweden. I don't want to know about the most delicious cherry pie some super-relaxed stay-at-home dad made with his towheaded toddler. I am not interested in hearing theories on what gave your 5-year-old such a premature grasp of quadratic equations, or about the countless benefits of living in Berlin for your now-German-speaking, bicycle-riding, train-hopping spawn. There's too much pressure, on parents in general and mothers in particular, to keep our kids away from corn syrup and bullies and industrially farmed beef while introducing them to chapter books and charcoal drawings and parasailing." Heather Havrilesky   "It was Mr Locke that struck the home blow. 'Twas Mr Locke that struck at all the fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundation in our minds." Anthony Ashley Cooper   "Nobody knows that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry how much it depends upon mood and whim: I don't wonder that in dismissing all the other deities of Paganism the Muse should have been retained by common consent for, in sober reality, writing good verses seems to depend upon something separate from the volition of the author. I sometimes think my fingers set up for themselves, independent of my head; for twenty times I have begun a thing on a certain plan and never in my life adhered to it (in a work of imagination, that is) for half an hour together." Walter Scott   "The most useful and practical part of the law of nations is, no doubt, instituted or positive law, founded on usage, consent, and agreement. But it would be improper to separate this law entirely from natural jurisprudence, and not to consider it as deriving much of its force and dignity from the same principles of right reason, the same views of the nature and constitution of man, and the same sanction of Divine revelation, as those from which the science of morality is deduced. There is a natural and a positive law of nations." James Kent   "Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attacked by reason; and at the same time reason is so clear in the point that there is no possibility of disguising her." David Hume   "Every generation believes they're the last generation on Earth." Christopher Nolan   "I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies—for those materials which are used for the destruction of life and the desolation of the rewards of labour—will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used, when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man." Richard Cobden   "Achieving the age of 62 or 65 simply does not carry with it a significantly heightened risk of poverty, nor does retirement. On the contrary, old age is correlated with wealth, the average 70-year-old being rather better off than the average 25-year-old. Becoming older and retiring from the work force is not a risk to insure against, but a near-inevitability to prepare for. A loss might occur on a birthday, but a birthday is not a reimbursable loss." Will Wilkinson   "When we closely study the French Revolution we find that it was conducted in precisely the same spirit as that which gave rise to so many books expounding theories of government in the abstract. Our revolutionaries had the same fondness for broad generalizations, cut-and-dried legislative systems, and a pedantic symmetry; the same contempt for hard facts; the same taste for reshaping institutions on novel, ingenious, original lines; the same desire to reconstruct the entire constitution according to the rules of logic and a preconceived system instead of trying to rectify its faulty parts. The result was nothing short of disastrous; for what is a merit in the writer may well be a vice in the statesmen and the very qualities which go to make great literature can lead to catastrophic revolutions." Alexis de Tocqueville   "Some day this country is going to get it—really get it. We had everything to start with—everything—but there's bound to be a retribution. We've followed the same selfish, greedy path as every other country in the world. We talk about the American Dream and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States, for this reason, is the greatest failure the world has ever seen." Eugene O'Neill   "Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they're working and earning here, they'd pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. They can cross. Open the borders both ways." Ronald Reagan   "In 1915, when President Wilson was asked for his reaction to Griffith's new picture—The Birth of a Nation was the first film ever shown at the White House—the president is recorded as having said: 'It is like writing history with lightning.' This was a particularly apt description for more than one reason: lightning not only has enormous powers, it is accidental. When I once repeated to Welles Mr Ford's comment about 'most of the good things in pictures' happening 'by accident,' Orson leapt on it right away. 'Yes!' he said. 'You could almost say that a director is a man who presides over accidents.' Renoir and Dwan, Chuck Jones, Sidney Lumet, Otto Preminger, all made very similar comments to me. And accidents like these are caused through the hidden source of fate, chance, destiny, luck—whatever we choose to call it." Peter Bogdanovich   "In today's pop-therapeutic culture pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs." Jean Bethke Elshtain   "Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants." Richard Vedder