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"It seems that those who legislate and administer and write about social policy can tolerate any increase in actual suffering as long as the system in place does not explicitly permit it." Charles Murray   "I sometimes wonder if my aversion to having kids is because if I did have one he or she would be middle-class, with all the attendant expectations: the kind of child on whose behalf I'd make calls to friends at The Guardian or Faber and Faber about a possible internship after he or she had graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. It's actually rather vile, the nice part of London where I live. You can see batons of privilege, entitlement, and power being passed smoothly on from one generation to the next." Geoff Dyer   "Orwell and the Coles were still writing at a time before council housing had come to occupy quite such a dominant role in the lives of the poor. And they therefore could not foresee some of its profoundest effects, many of which were embodied in the 'housing list.' Naturally the only fair way to allocate these precious new dwellings with all their modern conveniences was to set up a queuing system, to be calibrated according to need by a system of points—so many for being disabled, or elderly, or with dependent children. But such a list had two further effects: that it encouraged the queuers to show their wounds and to think of themselves as victims with entitlements rather than as agents with challenges; and it also meant that once having climbed to the top of the list and been allocated a house or flat, people didn't want to go through the whole business again (most councils were in any case slow to set up a transfer system) and felt inhibited from moving even to another part of the same town, thus becoming permanently dependent on the local authority. Sterner critics in the 70s and 80s came to argue that teenage girls deliberately became pregnant in order to qualify for a council flat, once the stigma of bearing a child out of wedlock had faded. I remain unpersuaded that this was the sole or even prime reason in most cases; a deeper longing to give some meaning to one's life often seemed to be involved. But at the very least, in those many parts of towns and cities where council housing became for a generation the dominant form of tenure, there was inevitably a growing need to cultivate the goodwill of the town hall. Council tenants occupied their dwellings at the pleasure of the housing officers. In what sense was and is their position much different from the unfree lower orders under feudalism—the serfs and villeins—or from the tenantry of a great Whig landowner in their tied cottages?" Ferdinand Mount   "Will imperialism continue to lose one position after another or will it, in its bestiality and as it threatened not long ago, launch a nuclear attack and burn the entire world in an atomic holocaust? We cannot say. We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of atomic victims. In the struggle to death between the two systems we cannot think of anything but the final victory of socialism or its relapse as a consequence of the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression." Ernesto Guevara   "Roman citizens regarded commerce and the arts as the occupations of slaves: they did not practice them. If there were any exceptions, it was only on the part of some freedmen who continued their original work. But, in general, the Romans knew only the art of war, which was the sole path to magistracies and honors. Thus, the martial virtues remained after all the others were lost." Charles-Louis de Secondat   "We all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant." David Foster Wallace   "The derogation of assertiveness as 'machismo' has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal with a man more overtly sexual than, say, David Cassidy. Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the 'terror and revulsion' experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too 'tender' for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too 'sensitive' for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality. The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened, because a male-chauvinist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should. The power of sex is just an oppressive myth, no longer to be feared, because what the sexual connection really amounts to, we learn in one woman's account of a postmarital affair presented as liberated and liberating, is 'wisecracking and laughing' and 'lying together and then leaping up to play and sing the entire Sesame Street Songbook.'" Joan Didion   "According to The Washington Post, 'several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore.' These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film-editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms. But they can't bear this setting that millions of people would risk their lives to inhabit because one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings?" Conor Friedersdorf   "Since, by and large, people choose to perform those actions which they think will promote their own interests, the way to alter their behavior in the economic sphere is to make it in their interest to do so." Ronald Coase   "Our riches did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea. The bricks, B.A.s, and bank balances—the 'capital' accumulations—were of course necessary. But so were a labor force and liquid water and the arrow of time. Oxygen is necessary for a fire, but it does not provide an illuminating explanation of the Chicago Fire." Deirdre McCloskey   "You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: 'Now I want to go this way.' I say: 'Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.' That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions." Ludwig Wittgenstein   "Just as the basis of ethics lies in manners, the secret of eloquence lies in a care for detail. The alternative is the ever-spreading swamp of the blog-trolls, in which the opinions of a frothing dolt are so important that no paragraph can last longer than a sentence. Or else he raves on forever without a break: either way, he has no sense whatever of nuanced argument. Nor can he pause to put in the capital letters, the commas and the apostrophes, not to mention the good humour, the sense of proportion and the common courtesy. Cram all that negligence into the frame of Facebook and you have mental cyanide in pellet form." Clive James   "All the mothers of the Islamic nation—not only Palestinian mothers—should suckle their babies on the hatred of the sons of Zion. We hate them. They are our enemies. We should instill this in the souls of our children, until a new generation arises and wipes them off the face of the earth." Tareq Al-Suwaidan   "The Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power. Other writers have at most told the truth only about groups other than the ones for which they themselves speak. The Machiavellians present the complete record: the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leader nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Individual saints, exempt in individual intention from the law of power, will nevertheless be always bound to it through the disciples, associates, and followers to whom they cannot, in organized social life, avoid being tied." James Burnham   "As for the governing class in England having no real foreign policy, of course our people tend to have even less, and the melancholy fact is that the capitalist and educated classes are those least to be trusted in this matter. It is, as you say, a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which are most interested in internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with other countries which possess a less altruistic civilization." Theodore Roosevelt   "Obviously you can call a man—it's the twenty-first century! Men and women are sexual equals! It's just that you don't want him to think you're desperate. Be strategic. Remember, men like the thrill of the chase, and if you're chasing him, what reason is there for him to chase you? You have to play hard to get (but not too hard). Don't be needy (but not too independent). Try being more of a bitch (men love it, really). Let him see who you really are—except for the part about reading advice books on how to nab a man while not appearing desperate. If he doesn't call, he doesn't deserve you! But if he does, invent somewhere exciting that you're rushing off to—after all, you have a life too, a great life! In fact, why aren't you rushing off someplace exciting? Maybe you aren't putting yourself out there enough, which is why you're at home waiting for this ambivalent loser to call you and reading advice books. By the way, is he actually into you, or is that wishful thinking? Wasn't that what happened the last time, when you got all goopy over Mr I Need My Independence, who basically treated you like Booty-Call Betty? Not having had a date in a year and a half is no reason to act like a doormat; remember, you're hot!" Laura Kipnis   "They think it's just terrible because we're going to start labelling kids from really young. But kids label each other already—they know who's sporty, who's bright. And if we can read a kid's genome, we can predict and prevent disease. If we can read their DNA, we can tailor the teaching to help a kid with learning difficulties. Surely it's worse to just sit in a classroom and sink, unable to read because no one has identified that you might have trouble?" Robert Plomin   "Demand curves slope downward. Which is to say, if you raise the price of something, people will be inclined to consume less of it. Those with a choice in the matter—say, a large office-supply chain with a mess of low-skilled part-time employees who are basically as interchangeable as toner cartridges in the greater scheme of office-supply things—will in fact consume less. If the thing that is getting more expensive is manpower, it will cut employees' hours, circulate a lot of those dopey 'do more with less' memos, and look for labor substitutes, like the banks did with those ATMs that haunt President Obama's imagination." Kevin Williamson   "All civilized peoples had once been savages, and if left to their natural impulses all savage peoples are destined to become civilized." Denis Diderot   "The population of Africa in 1500 was only 46 million. The soil being mostly poor, there were few agricultural surpluses and so no incentive to develop property rights. For lack of the wheel and navigable rivers, transport within Africa was difficult and trade was small scale. For lack of demographic pressure, African societies had little incentive to develop the skills that trade stimulates, to accumulate capital, to develop occupational specialties or to generate modern societies. The phase of state and empire building had only just begun when it was cut short by European colonization." Nicholas Wade   "To pay money for a voyage, not to some center of civilization where the proper study of mankind would be—as it ought to be—man, or even to some well-tended chateau with symmetrical plantings surrounding it, but to an icy waste with very large amounts of rock, water, and sand in it—this would have seemed to Voltaire the height of folly. Men did not risk their lives in such places unless there was a reason—money to be made, for instance. What changed between Voltaire and us—or between Voltaire and, for instance, Hilary uselessly climbing Mount Everest and Scott uselessly freezing himself in the Antarctic? A changed worldview. Burke's idea of the Sublime became a Romantic yardstick, and the sublime could not be the Sublime without danger." Margaret Atwood   "Is it really true that Americans used to believe in a story of westward expansion that romanticized the slaughter of Indians? That is not how I, for one, recall the many television Westerns of the 1950s and 60s. On the contrary, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Cheyenne, Broken Arrow, Have Gun Will Travel, the supremely satirical Maverick, and others invariably depicted bad whites and good ones; savage Indians and good ones; stereotypical Hispanics and heroic ones; devious Chinese, kind and wise ones, and mystical, frankly superior ones. The whole point of these Westerns was that most white men on the frontier were as wild as most Indians and had to be tamed by lawmen, preachers, women, and sometimes even by Indians." Walter McDougall   "Attica was traditionally credited with the inventions of civilization to an extent positively insulting to all other nations and the rest of the Greeks. According to this tradition, it was the Athenians who first taught the human race how to sow crops and use spring water; not only were they first to grow olives and figs, but they invented law and justice, the agon and physical exercise, and the harnessing of horses to carts." Jacob Burckhardt   "To some people, 'government' appears as a vast reservoir of powers which inspires them to dream of what use might be made of it. They have favourite projects, of various dimensions, which they sincerely believe are for the benefit of mankind, and to capture this source of power, if necessary to increase it, and to use it for imposing their favourite projects upon their fellows is what they understand as the adventure of governing men. They are thus disposed to recognize government as an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire. In short, governing is understood to be just like any other activity—making and selling a brand of soap, exploiting the resources of a locality, or developing a housing estate—only the power here is (for the most part) already mobilized, and the enterprise is remarkable only because it aims at monopoly and because of its promise of success once the source of power has been captured." Michael Oakeshott   "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members." Margaret Sanger   "It begins by asking, plausibly, 'Why should not I enjoy what others enjoy?' and it ends by demanding, 'Why should others enjoy what I may not?' Envy is the great leveller. If it cannot level things up, it will level them down; and the words constantly in its mouth are 'my rights' and 'my wrongs.' At its best, envy is a climber and a snob; at its worst, it is a destroyer; rather than have anybody happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together." Dorothy Sayers   "To appreciate the scale of the positive effect of fossil-fuel technologies in limiting and reversing habitat loss, consider that fossil fuels currently are directly or indirectly responsible for at least 60% of humanity's food and fibre. Thus, absent fossil fuels, global cropland alone would have to increase by at least 150% (or 2.3 billion hectares) just to meet current demand. This is equivalent to the combined land area of South America and the European Union. That would have further exacerbated the greatest threat to biodiversity, namely, the conversion of habitat. To put into context the land saved by fossil fuels in this way, consider that the area exceeds the total amount of land set aside worldwide in any kind of protected status (2.1 billion hectares)." Indur Goklany   "The informational chapters that interrupt the tale, the ones with titles like 'Cetology' and 'Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales' and 'Jonah Historically Regarded,' do not strike us as expert research fetched up by the super-smart Melville from his vast library of whale knowledge. There is no Melville here. He has faded completely into his story, becoming 'a nonentity, like Shakespeare,' as William Carlos Williams astutely put it. The grandeur of Moby-Dick stems partly from the fact that it seems larger than any individual author—larger than the self-described Ishmael who is supposedly telling us the story, but also larger than the real author we know must lie behind him." Wendy Lesser   "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." John Adams