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"What we can find words for must be already dead in our hearts, and so Hamlet rarely speaks without a kind of contempt for the act of speaking. Only what cannot be said is worth the saying; perhaps that is why Shakespeare bothered Wittgenstein so much. Rather oddly, Wittgenstein compared Shakespeare to dreams: all wrong, absurd, composite, things aren't like that, except by the law that belonged to Shakespeare alone, or to dreams alone. 'He is not true to life,' Wittgenstein insisted of Shakespeare, while evading the truth that Shakespeare had made us see and think what we could not have seen or thought without him." Harold Bloom   "True, genuine contempt, which is the obverse of true, genuine pride, stays hidden away in secret and lets no one suspect its existence: for if you let a person you despise notice the fact, you thereby reveal a certain respect for him, inasmuch as you want him to know how low you rate him—which betrays not contempt but hatred, which excludes contempt and only affects it. Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another." Arthur Schopenhauer   "In New York City, firefighters and police officers may retire after 20 years of service at half pay—which means that, at a time when life expectancy is nearly 80 years, New York City is paying benefits to 10,000 retired cops who are younger than 50 years old. Indeed, the city now pays out more for retired than active police officers each year." Daniel DiSalvo   "There is no place in the world where a man may live more according to his own mind, or even his whims, than in London. For this reason I believe that in no place are to be found a greater variety of original characters, which are the offspring of such freedom. Every one may choose his company according to his liking, and never trouble himself about his next neighbour, whom he oftentimes does not know even by name. A foreigner will at first hardly be pleased with the manner of living in London, because it is so different from what he has experienced on the continent; but if he has sense enough to perceive and to value that freedom in thinking and acting which is to be enjoyed in England he will soon adopt the sentiments of Erasmus, without thinking of the suavia, which he seemed to be so fond of, and wish to conclude his days in England." Gebhard Friedrich August Wendeborn   "The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere 'understanding.' Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey." Clive Staples Lewis   "We were faced with the question of what to do with the women and children. In this instance I decided to find a simple solution. I did not consider it justifiable to exterminate—in other words kill, or order to be killed—the men and to permit the children to grow up who will seek revenge on our sons and grandchildren. We had to take the difficult decision to make this race disappear from the face of the earth." Heinrich Himmler   "Many men take an interest in politics and war, but these diversions never appealed to me. I was about as political as a bath towel. No doubt it was my loss. To be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the 'political offerings' was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we'd witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm." Michel Houellebecq   "I'm continually taking up the cudgels for France against all sorts of Englishmen. This nation has something fierce and savage in its blood which comes out horribly in the rabble, who are hideous ruffians. Another thing, their government is excellent. Liberty, here, is not an empty word. Aristocratic pride and class distinctions are carried to a point that I find infinitely shocking; but these have certain good results." Eugene Delacroix   "'The longings of South Carolina are essentially monarchical rather than republican,' wrote Illinois reporter Sidney Andrews, after touring the South in 1865, and 'everywhere' there is 'a rigid spirit of caste.' Nor did Southerners themselves try to make it appear otherwise; if anything they dwelt in what they imagined was a feudal economy, not a modern one. James Walker, a Charleston lawyer, went so far as to insist that 'ours is in truth not so much slavery as feudality.'" Allen Guelzo   "Every one knows that to be a successful warrior was the highest aim among all ancient peoples of note, as it is still among many barbarous peoples. When we remember that in the Norseman's heaven the time was to be passed in daily battles, with magical healing of wounds, we see how deeply rooted may become the conception that fighting is man's proper business, and that industry is fit only for slaves and people of low degree. That is to say, when the chronic struggles of races necessitate perpetual wars, there is evolved an ideal of life adapted to the requirements. We have changed all that in modern civilized societies; especially in England, and still more in America. With the decline of militant activity, and the growth of industrial activity, the occupations once disgraceful have become honourable." Herbert Spencer   "Helvetius and Rousseau preached to the French nation liberty until they made them the most mechanical slaves, equality until they destroyed all equity, humanity until they became weasels and African panthers, and fraternity until they cut one another's throats like Roman gladiators." John Adams   "Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties. As a result, universities are now filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school." Benjamin Ginsberg   "The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office." Milton Friedman   "It behooves us to offset force of muscle by force of heart, that what our strong brothers have done to subdue the material world for us, who are not their equals in physical strength, may be offset by what we shall achieve for them in bringing in the reign of 'Sweeter manners, purer laws.' For the world is slowly making the immense discovery that not what woman does, but what she is, makes home a possible creation. It is the Lord's ark, and does not need steadying; it will survive the wreck of systems and the crash of theories, for the home is but the efflorescence of woman's nature under the nurture of Christ's Gospel. She came into the college and elevated it, into literature and hallowed it, into the business world and ennobled it. She will come into government and purify it, into politics and cleanse its Stygian pool, for woman will make homelike every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth. Any custom, or traffic, or party on which a woman cannot look with favor is irrevocably doomed." Frances Elizabeth Willard   "Mrs Thatcher is the point at which all snobberies meet: intellectual snobbery, social snobbery, the snobbery of Brooks's, the snobbery about scientists among those educated in the arts, the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial, the snobbery of the South about the North, and the snobbery of men about women." John Vincent   "Everyone hates debt, but everyone wants money in the bank. Everyone hates big corporations, but everyone wants the pension funds and 401(k)s that hold their corporate stock to deliver us tidy checks when we're too old to work. Which is to say that everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die." Megan McArdle   "Lenin was appalled by the rapid growth of the Soviet bureaucracy, which his own policies had necessitated. For as the Communist Party, through the state, took charge of the entire organized life of the country, nationalizing large and small industries, retail and wholesale trade, transport and services, educational and other institutions, the officialdom that replaced the private owners and their managers expanded by leaps and bounds. Suffice it to say that the organization in charge of the country's industry, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, employed in 1921 nearly one quarter of a million officials, and this at a time when industrial productivity had dropped to below one-fifth of its 1913 level. By 1928, the party and state bureaucracy came to number 4 million." Richard Pipes   "Famine does not strike at random. In agrarian societies, men starve according to rank. Agrarian society is a food-producing and storing system; the silos or stores are guarded, and the contents are distributed only in accordance with the enforced entitlements of the members. In north Africa, the local name for the state is or was Makhzen, a word with the same root as store, magazine. The term is highly suggestive: government is by control of the store; government is the control of the store." Ernest Gellner   "Let kings and princes fear lest the higher they are raised above their fellows in this life, the deeper they may be plunged in everlasting fire. Wherefore it is written: 'The mighty shall suffer mighty torments.' They shall render unto God an account for all men subject to their rule. But if it is no small labour for the pious individual to guard his own soul, what a task is laid upon princes in the care of so many thousands of souls! And if Holy Church imposes a heavy penalty upon him who takes a single human life, what shall be done to those who send many thousands to death for the glory of this world?" Hildebrand of Sovana   "All revolutions are total revolutions, just as all wars are total wars: and it is this total quality (peculiar to our century, owing to the terrifying power of the industrial techniques which confer upon a little group of men a god-like dominion over the surface of the earth which is their realm)—it is this total power which makes the future look so hopelessly black." Wyndham Lewis   "A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls." Karl Marx   "Look at any part of the United States where slavery has predominated for a historic period; compare its present aspect with that it bore when peopled only by 'heathen salvages,' and you will see that the luxury of slaves, and what other luxury through their labor has therein been enjoyed, have been acquired at an immense cost beyond that of mere labor. You will see that what has been called the profit of slave labor has been obtained only by filching from the nation's capital—from that which the nation owes its posterity—many times the gross amount of all the production of that labor." Frederick Law Olmstead   "Paper is an agricultural product, made from trees grown specifically for paper production. Acting to conserve trees by recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on corn consumption." Jerry Taylor   "It is in fact the business of a union to be anti-social; the members would have a just grievance if their officials and committees ceased to put sectional interests first." Barbara Wootton   "It is not too much to say that the lower classes in Britain between 1800 and 1940 had created a remarkable civilization of their own which it is hard to parallel in human history: narrow-minded perhaps, prudish certainly, occasionally pharisaical, but steadfast, industrious, honourable, idealistic, peaceable and purposeful." Ferdinand Mount   "We had a naive syllogism: If it was a revolution for the poor, then the poor couldn't be against us. But we should have known much earlier. We started out with 90 percent of the population behind us. By 1985, there were 400,000 Nicaraguans who had fled to Miami, several hundred thousand more in Costa Rica and Honduras, and we still only got 60 percent of the vote." Sergio Ramirez   "Because a utopia, by definition, envisions a perfect world, it must stand outside of earthly history. Fictional utopias are always located in isolated, insulated regions. And real-world utopias either follow their example, or imagine winning a war to end all wars to immunize themselves from further assault. Utopias are either irrelevant or catastrophic." Edward Rothstein   "I don't really know whether art can exist without a certain degree of tranquility or spiritual poise; without a certain amount of quiet you can have neither philosophy nor religion nor poetry. And as one of those specialties of modern life is to abolish this quiet, we are in danger of losing our arts together with the quiet of the soul that art demands." Saul Bellow   "Here's some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger's round-trip flight between New York and London, you'd have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000." John Tierney   "Women frequently take the appearance of the household as a commentary on themselves: appearance anxiety can attach equally to your domicile or your outfit. (Children don't escape scrutiny here either, little mini-me's that they are. The pursuit of upper-middle-class domestic perfection now encompasses not just homes but also childrearing, given the style of obsessive, labor-intensive parenting now in fashion in the United States, at least in the upper demographics.)" Laura Kipnis