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"The essence of free enterprise is that people become more prosperous by working for each other. The more they abandon self sufficiency for interdependence, the better off they are. The more they specialise as producers, the more they can diversify as consumers. And what this means of course is that networks of exchange and specialisation create co-operation, collaboration and community on an epic scale." Matt Ridley   "Properly understood, the economy has neither purpose, function, or intent. The economy is defined by a structure, a set of rules and institutions, that constrain the choices of many persons in an interlinked chain of game-like interactions, one with another. For any individual, there are, of course, 'better' and 'worse' economies, but these evaluative terms translate directly into references to sets of rules or structures." James Buchanan   "The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance." Friedrich Engels   "We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection." Charles Darwin   "It is often hard to predict what will be the solution. It is even harder to predict who will have the solution, and when and where. And it is even harder when the success of who, what, when, and where keeps changing." William Easterly   "If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom when we work only upon inanimate matter surely they become a part of duty too when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber but sentient beings by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable." Edmund Burke   "Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs." Abraham Lincoln   "The great and only possible dignity of man lies in his power deliberately to choose certain moral values by which to live as steadfastly as if he, too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of time. Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence." Tennessee Williams   "If I knew how to make copies of myself, I'm not sure that I would give the project high priority in competition with all the other things I want to do: why should I? But motivation is irrelevant for molecules. It is just that the structure of the viral RNA happens to be such that it makes cellular machinery churn out copies of itself. And if any entity, anywhere in the universe, happens to have the property of being good at making more copies of itself, then automatically more and more copies of that entity will obviously come into existence. Not only that but, since they automatically form lineages that are occasionally miscopied, later versions tend to be 'better' at making copies of themselves than earlier versions, because of the powerful processes of cumulative selection. It is all utterly simple and automatic. It is so predictable as to be almost inevitable." Richard Dawkins   "One of Boucher's better paintings is of his most important patron, Madame de Pompadour at her Toilette (1756). The mistress of Louis XV sits in front of her mirror applying the white powder and rouge that was de rigueur at court. But this is not just a court portrait. Boucher was often criticised for painting women who had already 'painted' themselves with make-up and for his use of unnatural pinks and violets. In this work, however, he embraces this critique by painting the making-up. In a further twist, Madame de Pompadour is depicted looking at her reflection, and holding her powder brush as if she is an artist painting a self-portrait. Here is art celebrating its own superficiality. In doing so, it absorbs any criticism made against it, like Warhol's celebrities—or Hirst's Golden Calf, which ironises the adulation and criticism his art receives." Ben Lewis   "I think shyness is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you're the only person in the world. That how you look and what you do is of any importance." Charles Schulz   "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am—for just an example—self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself (I mean, at least this stuff is on my mind, at least I'm dissatisfied with my level of integrity and commitment); but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others." David Foster Wallace   "There is an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups." Reinhold Niebuhr   "One must not blind oneself to the fact that democratic institutions most successfully develop sentiments of envy in the human heart. This is not because they provide the means for everybody to rise to the level of everybody else but because these means are constantly proving inadequate in the hands of those using them. Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. Every day this complete equality eludes the hands of the people at the moment when they believe they have seized it, and it flees, as Pascal said, in an eternal flight; the people become heated in the search for this good, all the more precious as it is near enough to be known, far enough not to be tasted. The chance of succeeding stirs them, the uncertainty of success irritates them; they are agitated, they are wearied, they are embittered. All that surpasses them, in whatever place, then appears to them as an obstacle to their desires, and there is no superiority so legitimate that the sight of it does not tire their eyes." Alexis de Tocqueville   "From the time he formed the Bolshevik organization, for which he was proud to claim the title 'Jacobin,' Lenin spoke of the need for revolutionary terror. In a 1908 essay, 'Lessons of the Commune,' he made revealing observations on this subject. Having listed the achievements and failures of this first 'proletarian revolution,' he indicated its cardinal weakness: the proletariat's 'excessive generosity—it should have exterminated its enemies,' instead of trying 'to exert moral influence on them.' This remark must be one of the earliest instances in political literature in which the term 'extermination,' normally used for vermin, is applied to human beings." Richard Pipes   "The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once. If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations stir up mine; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up to something above myself; and acquiescence is a quality altogether tedious in discourse." Michel de Montaigne   "When you use the word science it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing and that no science at all is going on. We have political science, we have social science. We don't have physical science or chemical science. There are just physics and chemistry." Peter Thiel   "What the school determines to accomplish it does so in a constant and total atmosphere of violence. We do not mean physical violence; we mean violence in the sense of any assault upon, or violation of, the personality. An examination or test is a form of violence. Compulsory gym, to one embarrassed or afraid, is a form of violence. The requirement that a student must get a pass to walk in the hallways is violence. Compelled attendance in the classroom, compulsory studying in study hall, is violence." Charles Reich   "The bitter Babylonian disputes about portents, the bloody and passionate Albigensian and Anabaptist heresies, all seem erroneous to us today. At the time, man was completely involved in them, and by expressing them at the risk of his life he made truth exist through them, because truth never reveals itself directly but appears only through errors. In the dispute over universal, or over the Immaculate Conception or transubstantiation, the fate of human reason was at stake. And the fate of reason was also at stake during those big suits certain American states brought against the professors who taught evolution. In each time it is wholly at stake in relation to doctrines which the following time will reject as false. It is possible that evolutionary thinking will someday seem to be our century's greatest insanity; yet in bearing witness to its truth in opposition to the churches, the American professors lived the truth and lived it passionately and absolutely, at their own risk. Tomorrow they will be wrong; today they are absolutely right: the time is always wrong when it is dead, and always right while it is living. People may condemn it later all they want to, but it has already had its own passionate way of loving itself and tearing itself to pieces, against which future judgments are powerless. It has had its taste which it alone has tasted, and which is just as incomparable, just as irremediable, as the taste of wine in our mouth. A book has its absolute truth in its own time. It is lived through like a riot or a famine." Jean-Paul Sartre   "Trilling modestly asks whether it might not be better for students to know something, 'almost anything that has nothing to do with the talkative and attitudinizing present.' He even suggests, in his polite, rather formal way, that it is possible in the university to confront 'the power of a work of art fully and courageously,' and even to 'discover and disclose power where it has not been felt before,' especially if that power has been concealed by the very fact of the work's having become 'a classic,' and by the other fact that its relation to immediate modern problems, as formulated by philosophy, sociology, and politics, is not immediate, not 'relevant.' No wonder Trilling is nowadays rarely referred to; in the modern world of academic criticism there is no leisure for discovering the answers to his questions, which are concerned with teaching in its relation to a much wider area of culture." Frank Kermode   "It is simply not true that works of fiction, prose or verse, that is to say works depicting the actions, thoughts and words and passions of imaginary human beings, directly extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowledge of life is knowledge directly in relation to ourselves, it is our knowledge of how people behave in general, of what they are like in general, in so far as that part of life in which we ourselves have participated gives us material for generalization. Knowledge of life obtained through fiction is only possible by another stage of self-consciousness. That is to say, it can only be a knowledge of other people's knowledge of life, not of life itself." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "Auden used to say that of the literary men he had known only three struck him as positively evil: Frost, Yeats, and Brecht. John Willett tells us this, and Ronald Hayman goes further. Auden said that Brecht was one of the few people who deserved the death sentence—'In fact I can imagine doing it to him myself.'" James Fenton   "Up to two years ago I tried, by stretching Marxist teachings, to bring them into accord with practical realities. Characteristically, or if you wish understandably, I fully realized the impossibility of such tactics when I gave a lecture at the Fabian Society on the subject, 'What Marx really taught,' about a year and a half ago. I still have the manuscript of that talk; it is a frightening example of a well-meaning rescue attempt. I wanted to save Marx; I wanted to show that he had predicted everything that had and had not happened. When I got through with my 'artistic performance,' when I read my lecture over, the thought flashed through my head: You are doing Marx an injustice, what you are spouting about is not Marx." Eduard Bernstein   "Remember this: when you resort to force as the arbiter of human difficulty, you don't know where you are going; but, generally speaking, if you get deeper and deeper, there is no limit except what is imposed by the limitations of force itself." Dwight Eisenhower   "When the Crimean campaign stripped from the British army its time-honored reputation, the defenders of the ancient régime pleaded not guilty on the plausible ground that England had never pretended to be a first-rate military power. However, they will not dare to assert that Great Britain has laid no claim to be the first naval power of the world. Such is the redeeming feature of war; it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social organizations that have outlived their vitality." Karl Marx   "Radical movements everywhere depend on the zealous energies of people who need little sleep and do not have to worry about the feeding, clothing, and sleep schedules of children. The average age of the Bolshevik leaders who took power in Petrograd in 1917 was all of twenty-six." Michael Kazin   "Here's the most important fact: The integration of our global economy has made life better for billions of men, women and children. Over the last 25 years, the number of people living in extreme poverty has been cut from nearly 40 percent of humanity to under 10 percent. That's unprecedented." Barack Obama   "Democracy is that form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles." Ludwig von Mises   "In Germany and Russia, it is true, a parliament in form is retained as part of the state apparatus. These parliaments occasionally meet and even pass a few motions. But even juridically these parliaments are no longer regarded as possessing the attribute of sovereignty. The laws do not issue from them. Their meetings are simply propaganda devices, like a parade or a radio or press campaign. Even in the United States the claims of Congress (together with the Supreme Court) to sovereignty are not undisputed. Most laws are not being made by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management, and the other leading 'executive agencies.' Lawyers know only too well that this is the case; to keep up with contemporary law, it is the rulings and records of these agencies that they have chiefly to study. Very little control over the state is actually today possessed by Congress. Indeed, most of the important laws passed by Congress in recent years have been laws to give up some more of its sovereign powers to one or another agency largely outside of its control." Thomas Byrne   "Not Locke, nor Hume, nor Smith, nor Burke, could have argued, as Bentham did, that 'every law is an evil for every law is an infraction of liberty.' Their argument was never a complete laissez faire argument, which, as the very words show, is also part of the French rationalist tradition and in its literal sense was never defended by any of the English classical economists. They knew better than most of their later critics that it was not some sort of magic, but the evolution of 'well constructed institutions,' where the 'rules and privileges of contending interests and compromised advantages' would be reconciled, that had successfully channeled individual efforts to socially beneficial aims." Friedrich Hayek   "Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness." Calvin Coolidge