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"'The natural man,' he wrote, 'who lives a truly human life and for whom the opinion of others means nothing, follows solely his inclinations and his reason, without regard for public approval or blame.' Natural man is what he seems, he is at one with himself, whereas social man is divided within himself. This inner break is the cause of his misery, and all the differences between the social man and the natural man in the end reduce themselves to this existential difference. In Rousseau's words, 'The savage lives within himself whereas sociable man, forever outside himself, only knows how to live in the opinion of others, from whose judgment concerning him he receives the sense of his own identity.' As our being is reduced to appearance, we are driven to ask others what we are, never daring to ask ourselves. 'We have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.'" Hans Barth   "Nature makes nothing that is incorrect. Every form in nature, whether beautiful or ugly, has its cause, and of all the beings that exist, there is not one a single one that is not as it should be." Denis Diderot   "A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque, to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act." Reinaldo Arenas   "It was that overrated sentimentalist Albert Camus who said that 'only artists have never harmed mankind.' The truth is, we do art no honor and no justice when we represent it as invariably humane, heroic and disinterested in its intentions, exclusively good in its effects, and thus not subject to reproach or accountability—sacred. Such compliments deny art the very importance which they appear to claim for it, I am not of course speaking of 'bad art,' that is, works which for one reason or another fail to earn the minimum of respect on the part of those who know. I am speaking of art in the usual honorific sense, and I say that to acknowledge its power entails the obligation to examine how that power is exercised and how our present blind submission to it affects in turn those who exercise it." Jacques Barzun   "From the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn't cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.' Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: 'An intellectual is a person knowledgable in one field who speaks out only in others.'" Tom Wolfe   "Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included prosperous Holland, much of it reclaimed from the sea, and Venice, a wealthy world power built on a few mud flats. At present, many millions of poor people in the Third World live amid ample cultivable land. Indeed, in much of Southeast Asia, Central Africa, and interior of Latin America, land is a free good. Conversely, land is now very expensive in both Hong Kong and Singapore, probably the most densely populated countries in the world with originally very poor land. For example, Hong Kong in the 1840s consisted largely of eroded hillsides, and much of Singapore in the nineteenth century was empty marsh land. Both these countries are now highly industrialized and prosperous communities. The experience of other countries in both the East and the West points in the same direction. Poor countries differ in density. For example, India's population density is some 750 people per square mile, while Zaire's density is approximately 40 people per square mile. And prosperous countries differ in density. Japan's density is some 850 people per square mile, while U.S. density is approximately 70 people per square mile. All these instances underline the obvious: the importance of people's economic qualities and of the policies of governments." Peter Bauer   "The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects." Adam Smith   "The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes." John Maynard Keynes   "There is no greater crime for a German than to be without any money and not pay on time." Fyodor Dostoevsky   "I have so far carefully avoided saying that evolution is identical with progress, but when it becomes clear that it was the evolution of a tradition which made civilization possible, we may at least say that spontaneous evolution is a necessary if not a sufficient condition of progress. And though it clearly produces also much that we did not foresee and do not like when we see it, it does bring to ever-increasing numbers what they have been mainly striving for. We often do not like it because the new possibilities always also bring a new discipline. Man has been civilized very much against his wishes." Friedrich Hayek   "In 1480 the Ming emperor of China ruled that overseas exploration and trade were forbidden; merchants who continued to trade were declared smugglers and troops were sent to destroy their settlements and burn their boats. No European king ever claimed or used such powers and no king could afford such a self-denying ordinance. In Europe kings operated in a network of rival states; the Chinese emperor had the advantage—or the trap—of possessing no rivals of equal power to his own." John Hirst   "A country which produces for a larger market than its own can introduce a more extended division of labour, can make greater use of machinery, and is more likely to make inventions and improvements in the processes of production. Whatever causes a greater quantity of anything to be produced in the same place tends to the general increase of the productive powers of the world." John Stuart Mill   "How do you get adults to really enjoy wine? It's very simple: pour it from an expensive bottle. There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you're drinking the expensive stuff, it tastes better to you." Paul Bloom   "Many traditions in philosophy, from before Plato through Christianity to Freud, have insisted that the true self lies only at the end of a long quest, a hard process of analysis, discovery and purification. And only an extreme scepticism could lead us to argue in advance against such processes of self-examination and self-improvement. What we may more reasonably question is whether they result in discovery of some authentic self that was there all along, or only the invention of a new way to act, a new script to follow or a new persona to put on. The metaphor of being born again may be more accurate than it sounds, and there is no guarantee that what is newly born is less self-deceived, less of a bore or an idiot, or in any sense more authentic, than whoever started the process." Simon Blackburn   "The psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has shown that juries treat defendants with more juvenile features more sympathetically, a travesty of justice we can attribute to the workings of our sense of sympathy. Physical beauty is yet another sympathy-induced injustice. Unattractive children are punished more harshly by parents and teachers and are more likely to be victims of abuse. Unattractive adults are judged to be less honest, kind, trustworthy, sensitive, and even intelligent." Steven Pinker   "Most backbreaking, lethally dangerous jobs—roofer, logger, roustabout and coal miner, to name a few—are done by men. It is men—especially working-class men—who are disproportionately crushed, mutilated, electrocuted or mangled at work. Activists lament the dearth of women in the Fortune 500, but they fail to mention the Unfortunate 4,500—the approximate number of men killed on the job every year." Christina Hoff Sommers   "Can honour set to a leg? No: or an arm? No: or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air." William Shakespeare   "The fact was that in Europe there were always some princes and local lords willing to tolerate merchants and their ways even when others plundered and expelled them; and as the record shows, oppressed Jewish traders, ruined Flemish textile workers, persecuted Huguenots, moved on and took their expertise with them. A Rhineland baron who overtaxed commercial travelers would find that the trade routes had gone elsewhere, and with it his revenues. A monarch who repudiated his debts would have immense difficulty raising a loan when the next war threatened and funds were quickly needed to equip his armies and fleets. Bankers and arms dealers were essential, not peripheral members of society. Gradually, unevenly, most of the regimes of Europe entered into a symbiotic relationship with the market economy, providing for it domestic order and a non arbitrary legal system (even for foreigners), and receiving in taxes a share of the growing profits in trade." Paul Kennedy   "In 1856 an average British man worked 149,700 hours over the course of his lifetime. By 1981 that number had almost halved to 88,000 hours—despite the fact that he lived much longer." Matt Ridley   "The Times of 15 August 1861 reported that 278 babies had been killed in the capital over the previous five years, their bodies turning up in the Thames, in canals, under railway arches, in doorways, in cellars and the like. For 1895 the London figure was 231. Direct comparisons with previous eras are tricky because criminal statistics from 1803 grouped the killing of newborns within the larger category of all children under the age of twelve months, but even so the official numbers are alarming: of 5722 homicides known to have taken place between 1878 and 1892 (of which about two-thirds led to prosecutions) around 20 per cent involved victims aged twelve months or less. By that measure young children were the most vulnerable of all groups in Victorian England. And they were particularly vulnerable because in an era when many children succumbed in any case to poverty or disease in the early months of life, it was not too difficult to kill a child without arousing suspicion. Child mortality among infants aged under one year may have been falling—from around 24 per cent in the 1790s, to 20 per cent in the early nineteenth century, to 15 per cent in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century—but even that last figure was a high one behind which to hide (by 1930 child mortality had fallen to 6.5 per cent; in 2013 to 0.38 per cent of live births recorded in England and Wales)." James Sharpe   "It was economic calculation that assigned to measurement, number, and reckoning the role they play in our quantitative and computing civilization. The measurements of physics and chemistry make sense for practical action only because there is economic calculation. It is monetary calculation that made arithmetic a tool in the struggle for a better life." Ludwig von Mises   "Most pleasures have early developmental origins—they are not acquired through immersion into a society. And they are shared by all humans; the variety that one sees can be understood as variation on a universal theme. Painting is a cultural invention, but the love of art is not. Societies have different stories, but all stories share certain themes. Tastes in food and sex differ—but not by all that much." Paul Bloom   "Do you remember the Paris terrorist attack that took place a month before the Manchester bombing? How about the Stockholm truck attack two weeks before that? The Saint Petersburg bombing four days prior? The Westminster Bridge attack in London in March? The machete attack at the Louvre in February?" Jonah Goldberg   "The tendency of an industrial democracy that took joy in work alone would be to live in a perpetual devil's sabbath of whirling machinery, and call it progress." Irving Babbitt   "The Americans are really the only nation on earth that I view instinctively with a deep hatred—like a false, voracious, sanctimonious, shameless beast of prey that deceives with every expression and in reality only snaps around looking for food for its insatiable, dollar lusting belly like an alligator." Karl Haushofer   "Even the most radical members of Congress professed a strong preference for remaining in the empire. So late as August 25, 1775, Jefferson wrote in a private letter that he sincerely wished for reunion and 'would rather be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation on earth, or than on no nation.' He added, however, that rather than submit to the unlimited power that Parliament claimed over the colonies, which, as recent experience demonstrated, it would exercise with cruelty, he would lend his hand 'to sink the whole island in the ocean.' At that time the colonists sought, as a Virginia newspaper essayist later put it, not a 'total separation from Britain' but a 'constitutional Independence, founded on the ancient Charters and original contracts of the Colonies, and warranted by the laws of nature,' which would give 'a total exemption from Parliamentary Government, under the allegiance of the Crown of England.'" Pauline Maier   "In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them. Let them then continue quiet at home, take care of their women and children, and remove from among them the agents of any nation persuading them to war, and let them declare to us explicitly and categorically that they will do this; in which case they will have nothing to fear from the preparations we are now unwillingly making to secure our own safety." Thomas Jefferson   "For Hobbes the state of nature represents much more than a breakdown of political authority. Rather, it describes a moment of almost primordial chaos, of absolute disorder, or even annihilation, comparable in some ways to the condition of the universe immediately before the creation. In short, the state of nature for Hobbes was synonomous with destruction of the capacity for meaningful social intercourse itself. Interpreted in this way as a condition of absolute privation, Hobbes's state of nature set the stage upon which the radical reconstructive pretensions of his political philosophy could appear as a plausible act of political creation." David Johnston   "Earthly kingdoms are founded, not in justice, but in injustice. They are created by the sword, by robbery, cruelty, perjury, craft and fraud. There never was a kingdom, except Christ's, which was not conceived and born, nurtured and educated, in sin. There never was a State, but was committed to acts and maxims, which it is its crime to maintain and its ruin to abandon. What monarchy is there but began in invasion or usurpation? What revolution has been effected without self-will, violence or hypocrisy? What popular Government but is blown about by every wind as if it had no conscience and no responsibilities? What dominion of the few but is selfish and unscrupulous?" John Henry Newman   "For Marx, capitalism meant the greatest alienation, the sufferings of many generations, and nevertheless he accepted these sufferings as the necessary price for progress; he constantly stressed in Capital that 'collective laborer' develops at the expense of 'individual laborer,' but he saw this process as creating the preconditions for socialism. He rejected and ridiculed the view that living people should not be sacrificed for the sake of future paradise, referring to such a view as 'sentimental,' 'utopian,' or 'reactionary.' Both he and Engels seemed sometimes delighted in emphasizing that history must be cruel, that the price for progress, whatever it is, must be paid. 'History,' wrote Engels to a Russian populist, 'is among the most cruel of all goddesses'; progress, wrote Marx, resembles 'that hideous pagan idol' who 'drinks the nectar from the skulls of the slain.' It will cease to be so, but not now, only after the final victory of the world socialist revolution. Is it necessary to 'dot the i' and to say that such habits of thought are especially dangerous in the situation where a revolutionary vanguard has seized power and feels responsible for doing everything to realize the final goal of history?" Andrzej Walicki