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"Manners are everywhere the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asiatic or European. They are good or bad. You are a slave under the Pole where it is very cold, and a slave in Constantinople where it is very hot; but everywhere a people should be educated, free and virtuous." Denis Diderot   "What I suggest is that we must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure. People must stop exploiting Islam for their abhorrent corruption. They talk of an 'Islamic' mentality so that they can assert that women are weak and unstable and incapable of playing a role in decision-making. They talk of an 'Islamic' economy so that they will be able to justify their exploitation of the nation's resources. They talk of 'Islamic' education so that they can justify their policy of brainwashing children and young people." Shirin Ebadi   "The communes, small cells in the village and city, must themselves work out and test thousands of forms and methods of practical accounting and control over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the cleansing of Russia's soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on." Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov   "War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime. That raises a moral question, the kind of problem with which the present age is disinclined to deal." Frederick Manning   "On one occasion when he accidentally shot his host's dog, Whistler declared: 'It was a dog without artistic habits and had placed itself badly in relation to the landscape.' This was delivered in a voice that contemporaries described as 'caustic nasal,' interrupted by a laugh like a peacock's shriek. Then there was his startling streak of white hair, which was not technically his fault, yet still managed to seem like an affectation. Yet despite all this, he was impossible to dismiss. Any writer encountering him found themselves compelled to put him in a book, just to show everyone else what they'd missed. Proust, James, Wells, Du Maurier and W.S. Gilbert all did their version of the Yankee chancer whose claims of genius teetered between the preposterous and the plausible." Kathryn Hughes   "My public, marketable self—the self put on display in interviews and slightly 'off' caricatures in provincial book-review sections, the book-autographing, anxious-to-please me—feels like another skin and hurts also. I look over at my younger self on the wall: a photograph taken in Earl Snyder's studio on Penn Street when I was five, wearing a kind of sailor collar, the edges blurred away—'vignetted'—in old-fashioned studio style, an image cherished by my mother, nicely framed the workmanlike way they do things in Reading, and always hanging here, in this spot, for me to admire and remember: little Johnny, his tentatively smiling mouth, his dark and ardent and hopeful eyes. For a second he looks evil. He has got me into this." John Updike   "Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one." John Ruskin   "Americans are slow tedious talkers, and universal semi-education has made them worse. Only the poorer blacks and a few rural whites are still able to express themselves vividly and to find the word they want without too protracted a search. Maybe this is because they never finished school. Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do. In fact, it is almost a comfort and I could wish the poor might stay untaught forever, for their own sakes and for the preservation of the language, if the price did not include other kinds of deprivation. Poor blacks, some rural white and a few gifted talkers are the only people I have heard in recent times use the language with relish. They are the only ones to enjoy talking artistically, for its own sake. Senator Sam Ervin's popularity on radio and television was based, I think, in large part, on his unabashed relish for the language; being old and rural, he sounded like a poor man. His relish for the language, sometimes positively syllabic ('eleemosynary,' you could hear his tongue taste those vowels), seemed to be deeply related to his determination to get the truth of Watergate out and to his confidence that this could be done—slowly and painfully, like a tooth-extraction before the days of Novocain." Mary McCarthy   "In the absence of trust, every private commercial or social interaction becomes just a little bit more expensive, a little bit less efficient, and a little bit less likely to happen at all. Individuals are more cautious in their dealings with strangers, businesses are less likely to extend credit, everybody is a little more uncertain about the future, and people adjust their investment decisions accordingly. Individuals and businesses spend more money on bike locks, security systems, and real estate they perceive to be 'safe,' rather than on the consumption or investment they would otherwise prefer. Critics of capitalism frequently observe that a liberal economic order depends upon, and sometimes cannibalizes, precapitalist sources of loyalty and affection. What if the same is true of political freedom more generally?" William Wilson   "Donations were collected on streets, in places of work, and by volunteers going door-to-door. Celebrities from the worlds of politics, economics, and culture were among those who pledged their time to raise money. Moreover, on one Sunday a month, the nation was called upon to make do with a simple 'one-pot' meal instead of the traditional roast. All these measures combined to symbolize the eradication of class divides in German society. Solidarity and propaganda here merged into one, personified in the figure of Joseph Goebbels, who headed both the Ministry of Propaganda and the Ministry of Public Welfare. It was the practical realization of Harold Lasswell's dictum: 'Gestures of condolence plus bread are far more potent than bread alone.'" Wolfgang Schivelbusch   "The only way I can see to get the maximum service out of our citizens is to draft us all and to tell us all where we can be most useful and where our work is needed. So long as we are left to volunteer we are bound to waste our capacities and to do things which are not necessary." Eleanor Roosevelt   "I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and causes all the forces of society to be absorbed by the state, because it necessarily ends in the centralization of property in the hands of the state, while I desire the abolition of the state—the radical extirpation of this principle of the authority and the tutelage of the state which, under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men, has until now enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and depraved them." Mikhail Bakunin   "All nations of men have the same natural dignity, and we all know that very bright talents may be lodged under a very dark skin. The principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the different opportunities of improvement." William Byrd   "There is no actuary in existence who can calculate how much of the wealth, of the strength, of the supremacy of the territorial families of England has been derived from an unholy participation in the fruits of the industry of the people, which have been wrested from them by every device of taxation and squandered in every conceivable crime of which a Government could possibly be guilty. The more you examine this matter, the more you will come to the conclusion which I have arrived at, that this foreign policy, this regard for 'the liberties of Europe,' this care at one time for 'the Protestant interests,' this excessive love for 'the balance of power,' is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain." John Bright   "It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions, and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends—and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it." Friedrich Engels   "I remember Lenin's saying: 'I call "moral" every man who contributes to the Communist revolution and "immoral" every man who tries to stop it.' If this is the meaning M. Zaslavski gives to 'moral' and 'immoral,' then it's true that I'm not moral. I do not belong to the Communist Party. But I believe precisely that an autonomous morality exists. I think we have definite obligations, including (among others) the obligation to tell—no matter what the demands of the 'historical process' may be—the truth. So just as M. Zaslavski reproached me for being a fatalist because I believe in freedom, and for lacking spirituality because I'm not a materialist, he taxes me with immorality because I am no partisan of Machiavellianism and realism in politics." Jean-Paul Sartre   "There is a danger that modern mass society starves the individual emotionally. Among the careful calculations of the bureaucratic state there is often no residue for commitment. But when all the normal avenues of commitment are closed, the need to belong may break forth in elementary ways. It is no accident that in the beginning the Nazi party was especially attractive to students, the very group which has felt increasingly unfulfilled by modern society. Fortunately, the Nuremberg party rallies belong to the past. Still we should read about them not as historic relics but as a warning of what may happen if society neglects the inner being or if man loses faith in his future." Henry Kissinger   "The American people, too secure in their isolation and grown too fat in their security, show all the signs of deteriorating national health. The very qualities which won a great empire from the wilderness are the qualities which they now seek to deny and punish. Once a race of ruthless and light-hearted men, putting the overt act above any metaphysical significance of it, they now become introspective and conscience-stricken, and devote their chief endeavors to penalizing one another for artificial crimes, and to brooding maudlinly over dangers and 'wrongs' that their healthier fathers never gave a thought to. In every evidence of superabundant energy, in every manifestation of sound wind and quick blood, they see only the spectre of disaster. They become afraid of everything, including even themselves. They are afraid of women, they are afraid of alcohol, they are afraid of money. And their fear, playing upon their sick will to power, arouses them to that abominable orgy of spying and hypocrisy, that disgusting mutual pursuit and persecution, which is fast becoming the chief mark of American civilization in the eyes of other peoples." Henry Louis Mencken   "War is all impulse, commerce, calculation. Hence it follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war." Benjamin Constant   "The more distant the journey of the merchant, the more profitable was it for him. And it is easily appreciated how the desire for gain was strong enough to counterbalance the hardships, the risks and the dangers of a wandering existence open to every hazard. Except during the winter, the merchant of the Middle Ages was continually on the road. English texts of the twelfth century picturesquely designated him under the name of piepowdrous—'dusty-foot.'" Henri Pirenne   "There is no one who in exchanging his own productions for the productions of another would think that the more he gave and the less he got the better off he would be. Yet to many men nothing seems clearer than that the more of its own productions a nation sends away, and the less of the productions of other nations it receives in return, the more profitable its trade." Henry George   "It is not surprising that Mr Keynes finds his views anticipated by the mercantilist writers and gifted amateurs: concern with the surface phenomena has always marked the first stage of the scientific approach to our subject. But it is alarming to see that after we have once gone through the process of developing a systematic account of those forces which in the long run determine prices and production, we are now called upon to scrap it, in order to replace it by the short-sighted philosophy of the business man raised to the dignity of a science. Are we not even told that, 'since in the long run we are all dead,' policy should be guided entirely by short-run considerations?" Friedrich Hayek   "The Weimar tax system was feeble, not least because the new regime lacked legitimacy among higher income groups who declined to pay the taxes imposed on them. At the same time, public money was spent recklessly, particularly on generous wage settlements for public sector unions. The combination of insufficient taxation and excessive spending created enormous deficits in 1919 and 1920 (in excess of 10 per cent of net national product), before the victors had even presented their reparations bill. The deficit in 1923, when Germany had suspended reparations payments, was even larger." Niall Ferguson   "I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong. We cannot finance the country, we cannot improve social conditions, through any system of injustice, even if we attempt to inflict it upon the rich. Those who suffer the most harm will be the poor. This country believes in prosperity. It is absurd to suppose that it is envious of those who are already prosperous. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation and all other economic legislation is not to destroy those who have already secured success but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful." Calvin Coolidge   "Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton." Karl Marx   "A real life has no crisis: hence nothing to tighten. It must lack centre. It must amble on. All the same, I can weave a very thick pattern, one of these days, out of that pattern of detail. Then I carried Leonard's lunch. Then I pumped my bicycle. Then I rode to Lewes." Virginia Woolf   "The first question is the one the audience asks: 'Why are you telling me this?' And you have to know why. And then you ask the audience a question, the only question I know to ask. You say, 'Is this like your life? Does this remind you of something? Does it seem familiar at all?' If you're lucky, it does." Mike Nichols   "It's true that I don't have anything to say and that I'm not smart enough to reconstruct the same things every day, so I just don't say anything. I don't think it matters how I'm appreciated, on many levels or on just one. The death series I did was divided into two parts: the first on famous deaths and the second on people nobody ever heard of and I thought people should think about them sometimes: the girl who jumped off the Empire State Building or the ladies who ate the poisoned tuna fish and people getting killed in car crashes. It's not that I feel sorry for them, it's just that people go by and it doesn't really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered." Andy Warhol   "Under the Dutch Empire, two-thirds of Delft households possessed at least one painted canvas—a decoration that initially marked elite status and was then imitated by the less wealthy. In pre-Revolutionary France, the middle class emulated the aristocrats by using wallpaper designed to look like palace tapestries, stucco employed to mimic marble, and porcelain disguised as gold. One could even pretend to have a library by installing fake book spirals on the wall." Elizabeth Currid-Halkett   "Nearly all of the English look drab. They're a drab species, like sparrows. When I returned after three years in the States in 1960, I couldn't believe my eyes. The sooty grime that I had originally thought confined to South Yorks seemed to have gone over the whole island, like a black leprosy. The miserable funeral colour and antique design of the cars depressed me. The rain and low sky, after the vast, staggeringly brilliant skyscapes of America, also depressed me. And always that sickening grubbiness of the English—whether it's their clothes or their cafe menus or their hotels or their housefronts or their newspapers—it was all like something infernal." Ted Hughes   "In order to understand what a market originally was, you must try to picture to yourselves a territory occupied by village-communities, self-acting and as yet autonomous, each cultivating its arable land in the middle of its waste, and each, I fear I must add, at perpetual war with its neighbour. But at several points, points probably where the domains of two or three villages converged, there appear to have been spaces of what we should now call neutral ground. These were the Markets. They were probably the only places at which the members of the different primitive groups met for any purpose except warfare, and the persons who came to them were doubtless at first persons especially empowered to exchange the produce and manufactures of one little village-community for those of another." Henry Sumner Maine