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"Treating women as second-class citizens is a bad tradition. It holds you back. There's no excuse for sexual assault or domestic violence. There's no reason that young girls should suffer genital mutilation. There's no place in civilized society for the early or forced marriage of children. These traditions may date back centuries; they have no place in the 21st century. These are issues of right and wrong—in any culture. But they're also issues of success and failure." Barack Obama   "It is, in other words, an illusion to believe 'tolerance for the tolerant, Islamism for the Islamists' makes any more sense as a policy than 'liberalism for the liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals' (to use Martin Hollis's phrase): for like all plans to appease wolves by throwing them carcasses, what begins with other people's bodies invariably ends with one's own." Henry Ergas   "Baby monkeys and apes are born able to do things that human infants can only dream of doing—assuming, that is, that their nervous systems were advanced enough to allow them to imagine an alternative, which they are not. Numerous researchers have suggested that human infants are in effect always born prematurely, with the nine months in utero only the beginning and an additional nine to twelve months required for the infant to reach a stage comparable to that of most other primates at birth." Marlene Zuk   "Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality." Camille Paglia   "The otherwise very different cultures of Britain and Japan were alike in their receptivity to incorporating features of other cultures into their own. This receptivity to advances made elsewhere is at least part of the answer to a question about Britain posed by an Italian scholar: 'How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?'" Thomas Sowell   "Spencer repeatedly emphasized that in using the terms 'fit' and 'fittest' in a social context, he was not expressing a value judgment; nor was he referring to a particular characteristic, such as strength, wealth, or intelligence; nor was he expressing any kind of approval or disapproval; nor was he referring to the biological competition to survive. This doctrine, wrote Spencer, 'is expressible in purely physical terms, which neither imply competition nor imply better and worse.' Most importantly, 'survival of the fittest is not always the survival of the best.'" George Hamilton Smith   "Only literature can give you this sensation of contact with another human mind, with the whole of this mind, its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its fixed ideas, its beliefs; with all that moves it, interests it, excites it or repels it." Michel Houellebecq   "As time rolled on, it became clear to everyone except English teachers that Steinbeck had gotten everything wrong in The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps deliberately. He was even off on Dust Bowl geography, having the Joads begin their California-bound trek in Sallisaw, in eastern Oklahoma, near the Arkansas border, where they have lost the family farm thanks to evil banks and evil machines such as tractors. In reality, the Dust Bowl of the early 1930s in Oklahoma was confined to the state's western panhandle." Charlotte Allen   "It's rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about, at least I would like to think so. Ambiguity seems to be the same thing as happiness or pleasant surprise." John Ashbery   "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?" John Ronald Reuel Tolkien   "Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread and we want to know the whole design." Anton Chekhov   "It's simply a whine. It's no more than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase." Stephen Fry   "I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, light-hearted, unconventional, mistress of her own fate, than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness." Zelda Fitzgerald   "So long as the state neglects its good blood, it will let its bad blood alone. There is no certain way of distinguishing between defectiveness in the strain and defectiveness produced by malnutrition, neglected lesions originally curable, or overwork in childhood. When the state assumes the duty of giving a fair opportunity for development to every child, it will find unanimous support for a policy of extinction of stocks incapable of profiting from their privileges." Herbert Croly   "No person who reads the narratives of modern navigators can imagine the Indians of the South Sea to be in a savage state. On the contrary, they must have made very great progress in civilization, and I believe them to be as corrupt as the circumstances in which they are placed will allow them to be. My opinion in this respect is not founded on the various thefts they committed, but on the manner in which they effected them. The most daring rascals of Europe are less hypocritical than the natives of these islands." Jean-François de Galaup   "You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will not continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies." Tennessee Williams   "In governments independent of the people, the rights and interests of the whole may be sacrificed to the views of the government. In republics, where people govern themselves, and where, of course, the majority govern, a danger to the minority arises from opportunities tempting a sacrifice of their rights to the interests, real or supposed, of the majority. No form of government, therefore, can be a perfect guard against the abuse of power." James Madison   "People no longer seem to know why they are alive; existence is simply a string of near-experiences marked off by periods of stupefying spiritual and psychological stasis, and the good life is basically an amused one." Arthur Miller   "As Mr Angell clearly points out, in all that pertains to this discussion, man was for three hundred thousand years unchanged. Then, a comparatively brief period of two thousand years has witnessed 'changes in human nature,' if we wish to express it so, greater than did hundreds of preceding centuries. To diminish the scale, after living fifty years as a cannibal, man in three months became Smith of New York, using a telephone, patronizing a commercial bank, and dealing in real estate loans. Slavery, the duel, and other social evils which men a few generations ago declared to be forever with the race have all been destroyed. The law of evolutionary acceleration hastens the end of war." James Armstrong Scott   "Some have tried to pose a choice between American ideals and American interests—between who we are and how we act. But the choice is false. America, by decision and destiny, promotes political freedom—and gains the most when democracy advances. America believes in free markets and free trade—and benefits most when markets are opened. America is a peaceful power—and gains the greatest dividend from democratic stability. Precisely because we have no territorial objectives, our gains are not measured in the losses of others. They are counted in the conflicts we avert, the prosperity we share and the peace we extend." George Walker Bush   "Sometimes the United States is attacked for failing to promote human rights; sometimes for wanting to impose 'the American way of life' on all people without respect for their cultures." Allan Bloom   "Men may seem detestable as joint-stock companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel in ourselves—so far within us that it remains intact though all the outer character seems gone—bleeds with keenest anguish at the spectacle of a valour-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but the abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick and drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God Himself." Herman Melville   "My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor and more than to the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century's civilization: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw." Gerard Manley Hopkins   "I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief expressed by architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvelously patterned systems that had mostly just 'grown' in response to myriads of individual human decisions. To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose hand it had been implemented. The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as naturally as a snowflake was foreign to them." Herbert Simon   "War necessitates organization, system, routine, and discipline. The choice is between efficiency and defeat. Pork will have to go. Government by 'deserving Democrats' will have to go. The executive side of the Administration will have to be strengthened by the appointment of trained specialists. Socialism will take tremendous strides forward. A new sense of the obligations of citizenship will transform the spirit of the nation. But it is also inevitable that the drill sergeant will receive authority. We shall have to give up much of our economic freedom. We shall be delivered into the hands of officers and executives who put victory first and justice second. We shall have to lay by our goodnatured individualism and march in step at their command. The only way to fight Prussianism is with Prussian tools." Frederick Lewis Allen   "The Romans never knew the dreadful folly of religious wars, an abomination reserved for devout preachers of patience and humility. Marious and Sylla, Caesar and Pompey, Anthony and Augustus, did not draw their swords and set the world in a blaze merely to determine whether the flamen should wear his shirt over his robe, or his robe over his shirt, or whether the sacred chickens should eat and drink, or eat only, in order to take the augury." François-Marie Arouet   "We're all trash, really. Without God to lift us up and make us into angels we're all trash." John Updike   "We began our revolution already possessed of government and, comparatively, of civil liberty. Our ancestors had from the first been accustomed in a great measure to govern themselves. They were familiar with popular elections and legislative assemblies, and well acquainted with the general principles and practice of free governments. They had little else to do than to throw off the paramount authority of the parent state." Daniel Webster   "Since the outbreak of the war we have not always avoided the danger of underestimating the strength of our enemies. The extraordinary development of the last twenty years seduced wide circles into overestimating our own forces, mighty as they are, in comparing them with those of the rest of the world." Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg   "Most people no longer live, but only exist, be it as slaves of an 'occupation,' wearing themselves out mechanically in the service of large companies; be it as slaves of money, mindlessly given to the delirium of stocks and promotions, be it finally as slaves of the addiction to entertainment in the big cities; just as many dimly feel the collapse and growing joylessness." Ludwig Klages   "The only religion I profess is that of universal humanity and benevolence." Edmund Burke