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"Housewives as a whole cannot be trusted to buy all the right things, where nutrition and health are concerned. This is really no more than an extension of the principle according to which the housewife herself would not trust a child of four to select the week's purchases. For in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people themselves." Douglas Jay   "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago." John Maynard Keynes   "We read Conrad; we read Wilde and Shaw, who were always mentioned together. From one or the other of these dramatists—or perhaps from Mencken and Nathan, then editors of Smart Set—we derived the sense of paradox, which became a standard for judging the writers we afterwards encountered. If they were paradoxical—if they turned platitudes upside down, showed the damage wrought by virtue, made heroes of their villains—then they were 'moderns'; they deserved our respect. Congreve, we learned, was a modern. Ibsen was modern also, but we were a little repelled by his symbolism and not aroused by his social message; we read him dutifully, self-consciously. Strindberg was more exciting, and we plunged into Schnitzler's early plays as if we were exploring forbidden countries in which we hoped to dwell. Reading, we imagined boys in other cities, beneath the green lamps of public libraries, scheming like ourselves to get hold of the books 'not to be issued to minors,' and being introduced into a special world of epigrams and süsse Mädl, where love affairs were taken for granted and everyone had the sense of paradox." Malcolm Cowley   "By their very outlook and vocation, intellectuals are peculiarly susceptible to ideological melodrama: it is their form of faith. The grandiosity of the abstract, the willfulness of schemes of perfection imposed through iron and blood, the feeling that anything short of a total measure is 'boring,' the refusal to examine the possibility that intertwined with utopian visions can be coarse yearnings for power, the infatuation with charismatic figures who represent decisiveness, rapidity, daring, intuitive authority—these are some of the elements in the experience of intellectuals that make them susceptible to authoritarian movements." Irving Howe   "Until the nineteenth century, it was generally believed that the earth was still found as it had originally been created—an event of only about six thousand years ago. There was no thought that the earth might be four billion years old, or that it had been transformed by vast geological upheavals and the biological evolution of dinosaurs and many thousands of other plant and animal species, most of which had long ago become extinct. A good Christian thus believed that in visiting nature he or she was encountering 'the creation' in its original character. God was not actually in nature—that would be the heresy of pantheism—but God had created the natural world as an expression of his true thinking and essence. God was like the painter of a picture that, amazingly enough, could now still be seen here on earth. One could thus discover in nature literally a product of God's own handiwork in the first six days. For the Christian faithful it would be hard to imagine a more inspirational thought." Robert Nelson   "It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such." Henry David Thoreau   "You should stay away from your potential. I mean that is something you should leave absolutely alone. Don't. You'll mess it up. It's potential, leave it. And anyway, it's like your bank balance, you know. You always have a lot less than you think. Don't look at it. Don't. No. Leave it as kind of the locked door within yourself and that's how it should be because then at least, in your mind, the interior will always be palatial, you know. Wonderful gleaming marble floors, brocaded drapes. Mullioned windows, covered in mullions, whatever they are. And flamingos serving drinks." Dylan Moran   "I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was in our modest garden apartment, in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word steep was the whole point. Once I decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work." Don DeLillo   "Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires." René Girard   "People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising." Mark Zuckerberg   "The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque. If a soul were able to reveal itself truthfully, if its shame and modesty didn't run deeper than all its known and named ignominies, then it would be—as is said of truth—a well, but a sinister well full of murky echoes and inhabited by abhorrent creatures, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity." Fernando Pessoa   "All these alleged sicknesses, sad as they may seem, are matters of faith, anchorings in some maternal ground for souls in distress. All these so-called diseases, pitiful as they look, are beliefs, the attempts of a human being in distress to cast his anchor in some maternal soil; thus what psychoanalysis finds to be the primary source of religions is none other than the source of individual 'disease.' Today, to be sure, there is no religious unity, the sects are numberless and mostly confined to individuals, or perhaps that is only how it seems to an eye entangled in the present. But such anchorings which find real soil are not a man's individual possession, they are preformed in his being, and afterwards continue to form his being (his body too) further in that direction. Who can hope for cure here?" Franz Kafka   "Absolutely nothing in the world will be changed if one ceased to paint altogether, although such a view cannot be advanced without alarming the conservative spirit of art lovers. Let them be reassured; we are not so optimistic as to assert that the day will come when no one paints any longer, but what one can propose is that painting, with the ensemble of superstitions it carries with regard everything from the subject to materials, from the decorative sensibility to the illustrative one, from composition to taste, etc., will in the near term certainly pass for an anodyne diversion reserved for young girls and elderly provincials, as is the case today with verse, and tomorrow with the writing of novels." Louis Aragon   "Whereas Enlightenment philosophes saw progress as civilization overcoming the resistance of traditional cultures with their irrational prejudices and outmoded institutions, for the Romantics the steamroller of progress was precisely what they feared. For Johann Gottfried Herder, the eighteenth-century German philosopher who best articulated the Romantic notion of culture, each people or volk was unique and this uniqueness was expressed through its volksgeist—the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history. Rejecting the Enlightenment belief that the same institutions and forms of governance would promote human flourishing in all societies, Herder held that the values of different cultures were incommensurate but equally valid. Every culture was authentic in its own terms, each adapted to its local environment." Kenan Malik   "Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B." Mark Lilla   "I'm not specifically accusing the youth of Russia; it's a universal law—intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn   "Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." Eric Blair   "Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that has produced him." Lionel Trilling   "Political machines, controlled by 'vested interests,' determine the elections, and there are intimations that the president has been 'made' by a group of gangsters: 'Many have the feeling that democracy is of such a nature that it could disappear from one hour to the next.' This is a direct result of the brutality that the capitalist struggle for survival breeds in its people. The wealthy control everything from universities (including private ones) to hospitals, and civil servants are merely the servants of political machines. 'No wonder,' Brecht continues, 'that something ignoble, loathsome, undignified attends all associations between people and has been transferred to all objects, dwellings, tools, even the landscape itself.'" James Lyon   "Robert H. Frank monitors something called the Toil Index—the number of working hours it takes a median worker to pay the median rent in one of America's big cities. In 1950 it took forty-five hours per month. A generation later it had edged up to fifty-six hours. Today it takes 101 hours. Much the same rising unaffordability applies to the cost of decent health insurance in America, and higher education. If 1985 equals one hundred, then the price of most things, such as food, electronic goods, basic clothes or a car, has fallen to double digits, and in some cases astonishingly lower. These are the products you find on Walmart's shelves. In contrast, the cost of obtaining a degree, or paying for a reasonable package of health insurance, has catapulted to above six hundred. The US rate of inflation has been hovering around 1 per cent for years. Yet the cost of services that will enable people to survive and their children to thrive is growing at double-digit annual rates. Inflation is another outdated number that no longer means much to the typical Westerner. It no longer captures what most people value." Edward Luce   "A string of German decrees banned Polish schools from teaching all the subjects which were regarded as central to shaping a sense of patriotism: sport, geography, history and national literature. In the Wartheland even instruction in Polish was prohibited; yet schools were also forbidden to teach German grammar properly, lest 'Poles should succeed in passing themselves off as Germans.' After most Polish teachers and priests had been executed or expelled, the authorities in the Wartheland turned large classes, which met for only a couple of hours a day, over to the wives of German farmers and noncommissioned officers, who drilled the Polish children in 'cleanliness and order, in respectful conduct and obedience to the Germans.'" Nicholas Stargardt   "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." Adam Smith   "They questioned whether guide dogs for Jews who had been blinded fighting in World War I should continue to be exempt from the tax on dogs. One participant drafted legislation imposing a special premium on income and assets taxes for Jews alone. The proposal stipulated that the amount of the premium was 'to be flexible so that it can be increased in special cases such as malicious behavior by individual Jews toward the people as a whole.' These initiatives required original thought and belied the cliche that Germans were reflexively obedient to arcane bureaucratic procedure." Götz Aly   "After 1890 the Russians took up a well-paying French alliance, and Germany faced a two-front war. One solution, adopted in 1897, was to knock out France by invading her through neutral Belgium. Then, to make matters much worse, the Germans announced plans for a great battle-fleet, designed to fight the Royal Navy in the North Sea. This started an arms race with Great Britain. It also meant much less money for the two-front army, and hence loss of the campaign of 1914. By 1914 the military leaders were obsessed by the rise of Russia, and wanted an attack on her before, by 1917 and the acceleration of Russian mobilisation plans, it was too late. Berlin used a Balkan terrorist episode as an excuse to challenge Russia, and when she mobilised, the atmosphere in the Prussian war ministry was of utter glee." Norman Stone   "We have progressed. We have evolved into understanding gender is not binary. It's not even biological. But what strikes me as so odd is that race isn't biological either and actually race has been to some extent less biological than gender, if you really think about history and our bodies." Rachel Dolezal   "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." Arthur Schopenhauer   "Readers influenced by the screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice may see Mr Bennet as an affable, mildly eccentric, delightfully humorous father. Jane makes it clear, though, that he is dangerously lax—ineffectual, incompetent. According to Lizzy, her father has 'talents,' but they have not been 'rightly used'—a damning indictment in a churchgoing culture still steeped in the language and stories of the Bible. He has not 'done his duty'—his financial duty. When Mr Bennet was first married, 'economy was held to be perfectly useless.' When, later, he began to wish that 'instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him,' he only wished it, and failed to actually do anything, persuading himself that 'it was too late to begin saving.'" Helena Kelly   "There were certain things you just didn't do, and that was that. Duty was very, very strongly ingrained into us. Duties to the church, duties to your neighbour and conscientiousness were continually emphasised. My father constantly drummed into me, from a very early age, 'You make up your own mind. You do not do something or want to do something because your friends are doing it. You never say, well, they're doing it, that's why I want to do it.'" Margaret Thatcher