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"Parents who imbibed too much Judith Butler in college and view gender as fluid and malleable may be startled by the counter-evidence provided by their toddlers. A 2012 cross-cultural study on sex differences confirmed what most of us already knew to be true: Throughout the world, women tend to be more nurturing, risk-averse and emotionally expressive, while men are usually more competitive, risk-taking, and emotionally flat. (Of course there are exceptions, but these researchers were looking at the norms.) As for play preferences, the female penchant for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble play hold cross-culturally and even cross-species. Among our close relatives such as rhesus and vervet monkeys, researchers have found that females play with dolls far more than their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. It seems unlikely that the monkeys are acting out a culturally manufactured gender binary." Christina Hoff Sommers   "I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue." Woodrow Wilson   "Venice, whose influence was felt from the very first, has a well recognized and singular place in the economic history of Europe. Like Tyre, Venice shows an exclusively commercial character. Her first inhabitants, fleeing before the approach of the Huns, the Goths and the Lombards, had sought (in the fifth and sixth centuries) a refuge on the barren islets of the lagoons at Rialto, at Olivolo, at Spinalunga, at Dorsoduro. To exist in these marshes they had to tax their ingenuity and to fight against Nature herself. Everything was wanting: even drinking water was lacking. But the sea was enough for the existence of a folk who knew how to manage things. Fishing and the preparation of salt supplied an immediate means of livelihood to the Venetians. They were able to procure wheat by exchanging their products with the inhabitants of the neighboring shores. Trade was thus forced upon them by the very conditions under which they lived. And they had the energy and the genius to turn to profit the unlimited possibilities which trade offered them." Henri Pirenne   "For a long time the best critics—Ruskin was one—told the western world that a great nation would produce great art. Art would come forth by a natural reflex from high endeavors and noble institutions. The maxim was really a license to criticize the nation and its institutions. Today, being self-conscious as well as disaffected, artists have come to believe that art can do without a nation, can be produced by aiming directly at art, in contempt of society. When done, the work of art suffices for all time and mankind can be dismissed. No need to ask whether in this conception 'work of art' stands equally for a Hemingway novel and a junk 'sculpture' consisting of the rusty springs of an old armchair. The element of quality should not distract us from the point, which is that the doctrine of art's imperishable value rests on a self-defeating argument: we must produce and support art—at private or public expense—so as to prove ourselves a great people and leave our mark in history. But our art and our artists use art to show that we are of no account whatever and might as well not exist—unless we happen to be artists." Jacques Barzun   "The civilized part of the world has now nothing to fear from the hostility of savage nations. Once the deluge of barbarism has passed over it, to destroy and to fertilize; and in the present state of mankind we enjoy a full security against that calamity. That flood will no more return to cover the earth. But is it possible that, in the bosom of civilization itself, may be engendered the malady which shall destroy it? Is it possible that institutions may be established which, without the help of earthquake, of famine, of pestilence, or of the foreign sword, may undo the work of so many ages of wisdom and glory, and gradually sweep away taste, literature, science, commerce, manufactures, everything but the rude arts necessary to the support of animal life? Is it possible, that in two or three hundred years, a few lean and half-naked fishermen may divide with owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities—may wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?" Thomas Babington Macaulay   "Like dozens of later novels from On the Road and Slaughterhouse-Five to Portnoy's Complaint and Bright Lights, Big City, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is not a growing-up novel but a not-growing-up novel, focusing on a young man's refusal to assume the social responsibilities the world is too eager to impose on him. All these novels go back in different ways to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the ur-texts of postwar fiction, with its emphasis on the inner life of troubled boyhood, and Huck's need to escape the corruptions of the adult world. This had a special point in the fifties, when maturity and adjustment were cultural watchwords, bolstered by a pop Freudianism. To Holden Caulfield, everyone from his teachers to the actors he sees on the stage are 'phonies.' Thrown out of yet another school, Pencey Prep—modeled on a well-known military academy where Salinger himself had spent two years—Holden is a genteel urban Huck Finn who dreams of taking to the road but instead, in his few days of adventure in New York, is actually in the midst of having a breakdown. The book thus brings together three of the main tropes of the fifties counterculture; the youthful misfit, the road, and mental illness as a form of social maladjustment and intuitive wisdom." Morris Dickstein   "What each one seems to crave, according to Sartre, is that he should be imaginatively contemplated by the other—a craving which is frustrated because of the reciprocal nature of the demand and because of the loneliness and essential poverty of the imagination. Sartre's lovers are out of the world, their struggle is not an incarnate struggle. There is no suggestion in Sartre's account that love is connected to action and day to day living; that it is other than a battle between two hypnotists in a closed room." Iris Murdoch   "Human babies by and large look much more like each other than adults do. So much so, in fact, that all babies have blue eyes to begin with, and only change into brown or green later. It helps keep dad guessing." Robin Dunbar   "A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes. This difference alone cannot tell us whether marriage keeps men away from crime or career criminals are less likely to get married, but the sociologists Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer have shown that marriage really does seem to be a pacifying cause. When they held constant all the factors that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter." Steven Pinker   "The daily work of earning a livelihood affords particular satisfaction when it has been selected by free choice, i.e. when through sublimation it enables use to be made of existing inclinations, of instinctual impulses that have retained their strength, or are more intense than usual for constitutional reasons. And yet as a path to happiness work is not valued very highly by men. They do not run after it as they do after other opportunities for gratification. The great majority work only when forced by necessity, and this natural human aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult social problems." Sigmund Freud   "The unraveling of family life in the inner cities of America has created a welfare state for women and children and a police state for the boys. The third of young ghetto males who are in prison or on probation or on the lam are grim testimony that, as a rule, women alone cannot raise boys. But the welfare state relentlessly punishes marriage and family among the poor." George Gilder   "When Facebook emphasizes only what I like from the subset of friends that agree with me, instead of what I have in common with all my friends across political stripes, it undermines the very relationships that power the site. When Facebook makes posting content an all-or-nothing affair that drives users to only post upbeat, insipid posts such as the ice bucket challenge and cat gifs, it undermines our capacity for civil dialogue in what has become the world's largest public sphere." Bernie Hogan   "In his essay on Shakespeare's female characters Heine mentioned a Christian acquaintance of his in Hamburg who could never accept the fact that Jesus was born 'among as repulsive a people' as the Jews. Heine felt the same way about the English. How, he asked, could Shakespeare belong to 'the most loathsome people which God created in his wrath.' His dislike of the English extended also to the Americans. On Heligoland on July 1, 1830, Heine dismissed not only the thought of going to 'infernal England, where I would not even wish to hang in effigy, much less live in person,' but also of going to America, 'that monstrous prison of freedom, where the invisible chains would oppress me even more heavily than the visible ones at home, and where the most repulsive of all tyrants, the populace, hold vulgar sway.'" Hans Kohn   "Horkheimer would charge that the student activists had an 'affinity to the mindset of the Nazis'; Adorno accused them of 'degenerating into an abominable irrationalism'; Jürgen Habermas, at a meeting before the main organization of student radicals in 1967, chided the young activists for what he called 'left-wing fascism,' which earned him jeers from his erstwhile comrades. Of course, the student movement in other countries could be accused of the same anti-democratic tendencies. But, again, Germany was different: it had the none-too-distant memory of the Nazis' attack on the universities, on intellectuals, on freedom of speech, on rational discourse, and it knew—or should have known—where political intimidation and the cult of violence could lead." Susie Linfield   "The complete identification with the necessity of revolutionary terrorism and of the revolutionary struggle in the Third World is the essential pre-condition for the liberation of the struggle of the struggling peoples of the world and the development of our own new forms of resistance." Rudi Dutshcke   "I remember that day in May 1968 when we heard on the radio that Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been denied permission to return to France. Thousands of people gathered spontaneously in the streets, and began to chant: 'We are all German Jews!' In their disgust, the demonstrators affirmed their complete solidarity with a man whom inept authorities had elevated to symbolic status—the denial of an entry visa added glamorous distinction to his already considerable prestige. Yet for all the sincerity the demonstrators possessed, their indignation tells only half the story. The improvised march was also a festival: Jewish identity was no longer for Jews alone. The event taking place put an end to such exclusivity. Every child of the postwar era could change places with the outsider and wear the yellow star." Alain Finkielkraut   "If Shakespeare's protagonists indeed are 'free artists of themselves,' as Hegel suggests, we should be not surprised that they move us to desire such freedom for ourselves, even though we cannot be Falstaff or Cleopatra. Actors know this better than most of us can. Their purpose in playing Shakespeare is to assert their own disciplined freedom against the challenge of roles too large to be realized: Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth. And yet the roles themselves threaten the plays: Hamlet and Lear cannot be cabined, cribbed, confined by Shakespeare's text. They break the vessels that he prepared for them." Harold Bloom   "The pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of anticipation, not accomplishment. The irony is that if your guess proves to be completely correct, when you have found everything a beautiful thing has to give you will have lost what made it beautiful, the promise of more, and with it the love that desired what was promised. Beauty beckons as love impels. The art we love is art we don't yet fully understand." Alexander Nehamas   "Christianity began in the far east of the Roman Empire; from there it spread throughout the empire; it then jumped the empire's boundaries and reached Ireland. Here it became Christianity of a special sort because it operated in a society that was not Roman. When the empire in the west was invaded, the Irish were safe; they then re-Christianised England and sent missionaries to Europe as well. The English came to look down on the Irish as 'Bog Irish'; the Irish know themselves to be the saviours of Christendom." John Hirst   "I always wear a helmet, and my kids always wear helmets. The question arises: Should the government force you to wear a helmet? Because it turns out when you do, fewer people ride bikes. If fewer people ride bikes, they don't get the cardiovascular benefits of riding bicycles. The community doesn't get the environmental benefit of people riding bicycles. And here's the kicker: With fewer bicycles on the road, drivers are less aware of them; and they appear to drive faster. So the absence of cyclists actually makes it a little more risky for those who are there." Greg Ip   "The necessity of acquiring, not merely the real necessaries and comforts of life, but the means of living in style, a certain inveterate national habit of luxury, inexorable vanity in short, answer in England the same purpose as the conscription in France; and the fondest mother thinks as little of resisting the one as the other. This universal principle of activity constitutes the strength of England. Whether it secures private happiness is not so certain. Placed as England is, she must be great and glorious, or perish." Louis Simond   "As individuals, Australians are generally matter-of-fact people who distrust fine phrases and understand hard realities. But in politics they have been incurably romantic. Thus it happens that their private shrewdness is constantly pricking the bubble of their public pretence." William Keith Hancock   "There is absolutely no reason to start applying for passports and packing your bags. In order to get back at the Jews there would need to be a change to the constitution. Where is the necessary two-thirds majority? And even a dictatorship of which Hitler would be only one part would not tolerate anti-Semitic excesses for anti-Semitism is now no more than an advertising slogan, and Hitler's fellow dictators would merely smile at him." Walther Karsch   "Sometimes I have thought to sail to America the free, to that great stable of freedom, where all the boors live equally. But I fear a land where men chew tobacco, there's no king among the pins, and they spit without spittoons." Heinrich Heine   "For me, money means not having to think about money." Martin Amis   "The great thing about a job, as Arbus realized in 1969, is that it 'helps keep you from unanswerable questions.' Without the time-consuming distraction of a job even trivial questions assume the weight of fate itself. You have all day to dwell on the slights dealt out to you, the decisions wrongly made, but this, in turn, can generate its own solace: with nothing else to distract you such things start to seem like facts of life, as much a part of the human condition as a bench is part of a park." Geoff Dyer   "Irreligion, discontent and covetousness have proliferated in broad sections of the population. The enormous expansion of communications, due to the world-wide telegraph and telephone networks, has entirely transformed the conditions of trade and commerce. Everything is done in a haste, at fever pitch. The night is used for travel, the day for business; even 'holiday trips' put a strain on the nervous system. Great political, industrial and financial crises carry this excitement into far wider areas of the population than ever before. Interest in political life has become universal: tempers are inflamed by political, religious and social struggles, party politics, electioneering and the immense growth of trade-unionism; people are forced to engage in constant mental activity and robbed of the time they need for relaxation, sleep and rest. Big-city life has become increasingly sophisticated and restless. The exhausted nerves seek recuperation in increased stimulation, in highly spiced pleasures, and the result is even greater exhaustion." Wilhelm Heinrich Erb   "Sure, Marx wrote about economic upheavals; so did lots of people. What he never managed to do was offer either a comprehensible explanation of why such upheavals happen or any suggestions about what to do about them (except abolish capitalism). By my reckoning, Karl Marx made about as much of a contribution to economics as Zeppo Marx made to comedy. Or as John Maynard Keynes more elegantly put it, 'Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and through them, the events of history.'" Paul Krugman   "Innumerable millions of human beings were killed in this century in the name of utopia—either progressive or reactionary, and always there were writers who provided convincing justifications for massacre." Czeslaw Milosz   "Nations learn only by experience; they 'know' only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their intuition were already experience, as if their aspiration were truth. It is for this reason that statesmen often share the fate of prophets, that they are without honor in their own country, that they always have a difficult task in legitimising their programmes domestically, and that their greatness is usually apparent only in retrospect when their intuition has become experience." Henry Kissinger