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"I am the first to say that on many great issues the countries of Europe should try to speak with a single voice. I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone. Europe is stronger when we do so, whether it be in trade, in defence or in our relations with the rest of the world. But working more closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy. Indeed, it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels." Margaret Thatcher   "It is very difficult for public opinion to judge such a body as the House of Representatives justly, because it is very difficult for it to judge it intelligently. If it cannot understand it, it will certainly be dissatisfied with it. Moreover, it is very difficult for a body which compounds its legislation by so miscellaneous a process as that of committees to bring itself into effective co-operation with other parts of the government—and synthesis, not antagonism, is the whole art of government, the whole art of power. I cannot imagine power as a thing negative, and not positive." Woodrow Wilson   "As we peer into society's future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow." Dwight Eisenhower   "It's the technocrats—those who scorned public opinion and asked us to trust the special expertise that only a background in international banking or academic economics can achieve—who have brought us the disaster of the euro, the immiseration of the Greek people, record youth unemployment in Spain and Portugal, unsustainable property booms and then crashes in Spain and Ireland, the weakening of Germany and Italy's banking structures and a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Oh yes, and a total failure to either predict, provide for or prevent the financial crisis of 2008." Michael Gove   "In the late 1980s, while American academics were emptily theorizing that truth, language and the thinking subject were dead, the longing for freedom and humanistic culture was demolishing the very pillars of European tyranny. Of course, if the Chinese students had read their Foucault they would have known that repression is inscribed in all language, their own included, and so they could have saved themselves the trouble of facing the tanks in Tiananmen Square. But did Vaclav Havel and his fellow playwrights free Czechoslovakia by quoting Derrida or Lyotard on the inscrutability of texts? Assuredly not: They did it by placing their faith in the transforming power of thought—by putting their shoulders to the immense wheel of the word. The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell." Robert Hughes   "What we see now is large enclaves of really affluent people forming these large communities in which they live conspicuously different lifestyles than everybody else—that's new in the United States. The extent to which the upper class rather openly disdains ordinary Americans, that's also really, really new." Charles Murray   "The people now regard us as complete foreigners; they do not understand a single word, a single book, a single thought of ours—but, as you wish, that is progress. We now despise our people and native origins so deeply that we treat them with a new, unprecedented disgust such as did not even exist in the days of our Montbazons and Rohans; but, as you wish, that is progress. How self-assured we are, on the other hand, in our mission to civilize, how haughtily we solve problems, and what problems they are! There is no native soil, no people; nationality is merely a system of taxation; the soul is a tabula rasa, a piece of wax from which the real man can be immediately molded, the general, universal man, the homunculus—you need only apply the fruits of European civilization and read two or three books. And how serene, how majestically serene we are, since we doubt nothing and have solved and signed everything." Fyodor Dostoevsky   "England surpasses all the other nations of Europe in the luxury of dress and apparel, and the luxury is increasing daily. Twenty years ago, neither gold nor silver were to be seen on a coat, except at court or the theatre. Persons in dress went in carriages; on foot they never wore swords, and the petit maitres put on their hats. This last custom remains, but all the rest are changed. Even the common people have embroidered vests. Everybody in summer as well as in winter wears a plain coat but of the finest cloth; no tradesman will wear anything else." Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz   "The purpose of an automobile factory is not to 'create jobs,' as the politicians like to say. Its function is not to add to the employment rolls with good wages and UAW benefits, adding to the local tax base and helping to sustain the community—as desirable as all those things are. The purpose of an automobile factory is not to create jobs—it is to create automobiles." Kevin Williamson   "If Marx viewed Trémaux's work as 'a very important improvement on Darwin,' it was because 'progress, which in Darwin is purely accidental, is here necessary on the basis of the periods of development of the body of the earth.' Virtually every follower of Darwin at the time believed he had given a scientific demonstration of progress in nature; but though Darwin himself sometimes wavered on the point, that was never his fundamental view. Darwin's theory of natural selection says nothing about any kind of betterment—as Darwin once noted, when judged from their own standpoint bees are an improvement on human beings—and it is testimony to Marx's penetrating intelligence that, unlike the great majority of those who promoted the idea of evolution, he understood this absence of the idea of progress in Darwinism. Yet he was just as emotionally incapable as they were of accepting the contingent world that Darwin had uncovered." John Gray   "Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves indifference as a power—how could you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, 'living according to Nature,' means actually the same as 'living according to life'—how could you do differently?" Friedrich Nietzsche   "Much of the time, the best that a woman exposed as unfaithful could hope for was to end up like Anna Karenina, while the worst a wandering husband had to fear was the need to remarry (or perhaps, like Prince Oblonsky in the first chapter of Tolstoy's novel, to spend three nights on the couch while his wife's rage melted away). The shame suffered by sinners and the tolerance for violence directed against them, I suspect, were functions of the perceived economic costs of infidelity and the strength of the economic weapons in the wronged partner's hands." Ian Morris   "When I returned from Germany in 1932—I was very young—I had a conversation with the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Paganon. 'Tell me about your experiences,' he said. I made a very Ecole Normale kind of presentation, apparently brilliant—at the time, my presentations were brilliant. 'All that is very interesting,' he said after about fifteen minutes, 'but if you were in my place, what would you do?' Well, I was much less brilliant in the answer to that question." Raymond Aron   "Writers have always more or less chosen the imaginary. They have a need for a certain ration of fiction." Jean-Paul Sartre   "His praise for Nazism was fulsome and his attack on the Third Republic politicians egregious. Brasillach attacked Leon Blum and other republicans on trial in Riom. His memorable comment on the Third Republic was that it was 'an old syphilitic whore, stinking of patchouli and yeast infection, still exhaling her bad odours, still standing on her sidewalk. In spite of her canker sores and her gonorrhoea, she had taken so many bills into her garters that her clients didn't have the heart to abandon her.' He admired Nazi-like aesthetics in rituals, flags, parades, in virility and male bonding with its homoerotic implication. He was friendly with Nazi intellectuals and propagandists in Paris and agreed to their suggestion to attack writers opposed to collaboration. He prided himself on being a 'rational anti-Semite,' and an aesthetic, joyous fascist." Michael Curtis   "Muslims are being called terrorists, as the cause of the destruction of world peace; but it is not the reality; Muslims are fighting the war of their survival. Muslims are not terrorists; they are the lovers of peace and preachers of peace. And all the troubles that exist around the world are because of the Jews. When the Jews are wiped out, then the world would be purified and the sun of peace would begin to rise on the entire world." Raza Saqib Mustafai   "Words that in a normal, civilized society had a negative connotation acquired the opposite sense under Nazism, he noted; so that 'fanatical,' 'brutal,' 'ruthless,' 'uncompromising,' 'hard' all became words of praise instead of disapproval. The German language became a language of superlatives, so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic and incomparable. Government statistics underwent an inflation that took them far beyond the limits of the plausible. Decisions were always final, changes were always made to last for ever. The language used about Hitler, Klemperer noted, was shot through and through with religious metaphors; people 'believed in him,' he was the redeemer, the saviour, the instrument of Providence, his spirit lived in and through the German nation, the Third Reich was the eternal and everlasting Kingdom of the German people, and those who had died in its cause were martyrs. Nazi institutions domesticated themselves in the German language through abbreviations and acronyms, until talking about them became an unthinking part of everyday life. Above all, perhaps, Nazism imbued the German language with the metaphors of battle: the battle for jobs, the struggle for existence, the fight for culture." Richard Evans   "Jews, it is said, making themselves at home in Berlin, transformed it, and imprinted upon it something of their rootlessness, their restlessness, their alienation from soil and tradition, their pervasive disrespect for authority, their mordant wit. The poet Gottfried Benn, hardly a sympathetic witness, said of the Jews in Berlin: 'The overflowing plenty of stimuli, of artistic, scientific, commercial improvisations which placed the Berlin of 1918 to 1933 in the class of Paris stemmed for the most part from the talents of this sector of the population, its international connections, its sensitive restlessness, and above all its dead-certain—totsichere—instinct for quality.' And in 1938, a Nazi writer named Tüdel Weller put it succinctly: 'Berlin is the domain of the Jews.'" Peter Gay   "Things that used to horrify and torment me now leave me cold. It's true. When I first saw 'For Aryans Only' on the benches, or 'No Jews' in the cafes, the broken windows, I could hardly believe it. Now I just pass by and scarcely notice it." Ruth Maier   "They pretend to hate us as a pretext for taking our objects away, and they pretend that we obtained those objects by criminal means, in order to establish their moral right to appropriate them in front of their deity. They are killing us for the sake of our objects." Béla Zsolt   "It judges those who profess faith more harshly than it judges unbelievers. It holds them up to a standard of conduct so demanding that many of them inevitably fall short. It has no patience with those who make excuses for themselves—an art in which Americans have come to excel. If it is ultimately forgiving of human weakness and folly, it is not because it ignores them or attributes them exclusively to unbelievers. For those who take religion seriously, belief is a burden, not a self-righteous claim to some privileged moral status." Christopher Lasch   "My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy." Mary Ann Evans   "Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. But, if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent." Jonathan Swift   "All kings and princes of this earth who live not piously and in their deeds show not a becoming fear of God are ruled by demons and are sunk in miserable slavery. Such men desire to rule, not guided by the love of God, as priests are, for the glory of God and the profit of human souls, but to display their intolerable pride and to satisfy the lusts of their mind. Of these St Augustine says in the first book of his Christian doctrine: 'He who tries to rule over other men—who are by nature equal to him—acts with intolerable pride.'" Hildebrand of Sovana   "The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections. The best system is the one that hurts us the least." Richard Epstein   "Our chief enemy is nettles and mosquitoes. All patrols—English and German—are much averse to the death and glory principle; so, on running up against one another in the long wet rustling clover, both pretend that they are Levites and the other is a Good Samaritan—and pass by on the other side, no word spoken. For either side to bomb the other would be a useless violation of the unwritten laws that govern the relations of combatants permanently within a hundred yards of distance of each other, who have found out that to provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for themselves: until they have their heads banged forcibly together by the red-capped powers behind them, whom neither attempts to understand." Charles Sorley   "The classical site of Western European revolutions is France. The resounding of momentous phrases, streams of blood in the streets, la sainte guillotine, terrifying nights of conflagration, heroic death at the barricades, orgies of the crazed masses—all these things point up the sadistic mentality of this race. The whole repertoire of symbolic words and deeds for the perfect revolution originated in Paris, and we only gave a bad imitation of them." Oswald Spengler   "There is no nineteenth-century answer to a twentieth-century query. There is no way back to the age of innocence. It was swallowed up by the great holocaust. In this sense, the World War was meant to be the liquidation of the nineteenth century. Cruel and horrid, wasteful and unwarranted though it is, there is design in its workings. It may even constitute a major agency of social change. War and revolution seem to be common devices we often prefer for institutionalizing change. To make them a torch instead of a firebrand, we have to recognize the signs of the time." Sigmund Neumann   "The accelerating spread of information and ideas throughout the world, coupled with rising education standards and growing prosperity, is prompting demands for genuine political rights. Critics of globalisation maintain that a dynamic market and international capital are a threat to democracy, but what they really see threatened is the use that they would like to make of democracy. Never before in human history have democracy, universal suffrage, and the free formation of opinion been as widespread as they are today." Johan Norberg   "It is not only in his knowledge, but in his aims and values, that man is the creature of civilization; in the last resort, it is the relevance of these individual wishes to the perpetuation of the group or the species that will determine whether they will persist or change. It is, of course, a mistake to believe that we can draw conclusions about what our values ought to be simply because we realize they are a product of evolution. But we cannot reasonably doubt that these values are created and altered by the same evolutionary forces that have produced our intelligence. All that we can know is that the ultimate decision about what is good or bad will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the decline of the groups that have adhered to the 'wrong' beliefs." Friedrich Hayek   "For the owners, disdain and sadism sat side by side with a degree of fear and anxiety about their dependence and vulnerability, which numerous popular sayings and anecdotes capture. 'All slaves are enemies' was one piece of Roman wisdom. And in the reign of the emperor Nero, when someone had the bright idea to make slaves wear uniforms, it was rejected on the grounds that this would make clear to the slave population just how numerous they were." Mary Beard