+ "The fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic 'civilization' in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women's energy, who deny women economic and political power." Mary Daly "Some people are at ease with themselves so the world is at ease with them. My parents thought this kind of ease was produced by education: 'Your Dad and me can't mix; we've not been educated.' They didn't see that what disqualified them was temperament, just as, though educated to the hilt, it disqualifies me. What keeps us in our place is embarrassment." Alan Bennett "Ever since early adolescence, Flaubert had regarded bourgeois existence as an immense, indistinct, unmitigated state of mindlessness. His Dictionary of Received Ideas was a monument to this precocious insight. For Flaubert, each bourgeois phrase, each bourgeois feeling, each bourgeois opinion, is touched by the hilarious dismaying suspicion of fakery. Solemnly and energetically proclaiming their cliches to each other, perhaps the bourgeois are indeed simply machines. They are stuck, like busy automata, in their perpetual false consciousness. There are hints of this sombre vision in Madame Bovary. Received ideas circulate unchallenged. But the suspicion is never allowed to take conclusive shape. The case remains teasingly unproven. What does Homais do, the busiest of them all? Most obviously, he talks a great deal. As soon as he comes on to the scene, at the beginning of Part Two, he takes over the conversation. He plays the part of a usurping comic narrator. He greets the newly arrived Charles and Emma. He tells them everything about the public life of Yonville. He is an invulnerably self-important know-all. The great torrent of Homais's talk splendidly fills up much of the space left empty by Flaubert's impersonal mode of story-telling." Geoffrey Wall "What a place America is. Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made. The bread is in cellophane that is covered with such slogans as de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blasphemin. There is no such thing as bread. You cannot buy bread." Ted Hughes "It is no accident that what we call genre painting flourished in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. These paintings offer glimpses into the daily lives of upper-middle-class people. They show women engaged in everyday household activities, like making lace or preparing food. They picture the middle class enjoying the new luxury of musical concerts at home (imagine the thrill of having your own harpsichord in your living room—the subject of several of these paintings). Above all, these paintings reveal the ups and downs of romantic affairs. They feature men courting women, lovers communicating in the face of absence, lovers suffering the pangs of anticipation and of rejection, and so on. For the first time, a broad segment of the middle class could afford paintings and what it evidently wanted in art was a mirror of its own middle-class way of life." Paul Cantor "It is the conflicting fate of an American artist to long for profundity while suspecting that, most profoundly, none exists; all is surface, and rather flimsy surface at that." John Updike "This is what moves me about the skyscrapers: they proclaim that man is not a being who stagnates but one who is full of energy, expansion, conquest. And in the extravagant profusion of drugstores, there's a poetry as exciting as in a baroque church: man has caught the raw thing in the trap of his desires; he asserts the power of his imagination over matter. New York and Chicago reflect the existence of this demiurge of imperious dreams, and that's why they are the most human and exalted cities I know. There is no place here for the dreary wisdom of the petit bourgeois in carpet slippers whose only project, as expressed, for example, in the famous sonnet on happiness, 'is to stay at home and gently wait for death.' To devote yourself to such an expectation is already death. In this sense, Americans are fully alive: they live in the perspective not of death but of life. They are not satisfied with inertia; they judge a man by his acts: in order to be, you must do. The great metal bridges, the buildings, Grand Central Station, Park Avenue, the airports, the roads, and the mines are the affirmation of this faith." Simone de Beauvoir "The fiery youth of today would recoil in horror if one were to show him his portrait in old age. So, as you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don't leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards! Old age, inevitable and inescapable, is terrible and menacing, for it never gives anything back, it returns nothing! The grave is more merciful than old age. On the tomb is written: 'Here Lies a Man,' but you can read nothing on the cold and callous features of inhuman old age." Nikolai Gogol "Marriage is a dog kennel in which complacency lives and is never chained up. Marriage is a jewellery box which, by some mysterious opposite of alchemy, turns gold, silver and diamonds back into base metal, paste and quartz. Marriage is a disused boathouse containing an old, two-person canoe, no longer water-worthy, with holes in the bottom and one missing paddle." Julian Barnes "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him." Jenny Offill "The young ones scoot about on motor-bikes with girls, and jazz when they get a chance. But they're very dead. And it needs money. Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't." David Herbert Lawrence "Any decent writer sees his first concern as the rendering of what he takes to be permanent in human nature, and this holds true no matter how 'contemporary' his material. Now and again he may feel—we should perhaps think less of him if he did not ever feel—that there are some political causes too vast or urgent to be subordinated to mere literature, and will allow one or other such to determine the shape of what he writes. But by doing so he will have been guilty of betrayal. He will have accelerated the arrival of the day on which it is generally agreed that a novel or a poem or a play is no more than a system of generalisations orchestrated in terms of plot and diction and situation and the rest; the day, in other words, on which the novel, the poem, and the play cease to exist, and that is the worst prospect of all." Kingsley Amis "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." Emil Mihai Cioran "According to the UN's own climate model, the difference between a world with all the promised Paris cuts and one without them is just 0.05°C. Even if every nation including the US extended its carbon cut promises past 2030 and kept them going throughout the century, temperatures would drop by less than 0.2°C." Bjorn Lomborg "A Chancellor of the Exchequer apologizing for an increase in the surtax, a Fascist dictator organizing a Corporate State, a Soviet Commissar ejecting a kulak and adding his acres to a collective farm, are all running the same race, though all of them except the Commissar may be extremely reluctant to win it. For in the long run the power to exterminate is too grave to be left in any hands but those of a thoroughly Communist Government responsible to the whole community. The landlord with his writ of ejectment and the employer with his sack, must finally go the way of the nobleman with his sword and his benefit of clergy, and of Hannibal Chollop with his bowie knife and pistol." George Bernard Shaw "Compare Britain, the source of the Industrial Revolution, the economic superpower of the nineteenth century, with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overpopulated and overcrowded, no resources except for a great harbour. Yet this spit of overcrowded land is able within four decades to provide its people with a level of income one third higher than that enjoyed by the residents of its mother country." Milton Friedman "In the United States, over one thousand occupations require licenses from the government. Opening a new hospital requires the existing hospitals to grant a certificate of need. In Tennessee, if you wish to open a new furniture moving company—two men and a truck—you are required by law to ask permission of the existing moving companies. Protection of existing jobs has created worldwide a massive and politically explosive unemployment of youths. One-quarter of French people under 25 and out of schooling are unemployed." Deirdre McCloskey "If the feudal government was so little favourable to the true liberty even of the military vassal, it was still more destructive of the independence and security of the other members of the state, or what, in a proper sense, we call the people. A great part of them were serfs, and lived in a state of absolute slavery or villanage: the other inhabitants of the country paid their rents in services, which were in a great measure arbitrary, and they could expect no redress of injuries, in a court of barony, from men who thought they had a right to oppress and tyrannise over them: the towns were situated either within the demesnes of the king, or the lands of the great barons, and were almost entirely subjected to the absolute will of their master. The languishing state of commerce kept the inhabitants poor and contemptible, and the political institutions were calculated to render that poverty perpetual. The barons and gentry, living in rustic plenty and hospitality, gave no encouragement to the arts, and had no demand for any of the more elaborate manufactures: every profession was held in contempt but that of arms: and if any merchant or manufacturer rose by industry and frugality to a degree of opulence, he found himself but the more exposed to injuries, from the envy and avidity of the military nobles." David Hume "When students from China study in Western countries one of the lessons they learn is that the enforcement of intellectual orthodoxy does not require an authoritarian government. In institutions that proclaim their commitment to critical inquiry, censorship is most effective when it is self-imposed. A defining feature of tyranny, the policing of opinion is now established practice in societies that believe themselves to be freer than they have ever been." John Gray "The division of labour would be no blessing if those by whom a thing is done were to pay no attention to the opinion of those for whom it is done." Thomas Babington Macaulay "To shout is not to argue. To censor is not to reason. To bawl is not to persuade." Dyson Heydon "The language of campus speech codes is designed to give the illusion of precision, while remaining so vague that they can be enforced however administrators want to enforce them, whenever personal complaints, student protests, lawsuits, or adverse publicity make it expedient to punish someone for being 'offensive.'" Geoffrey Miller "A thing could be true, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it—so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of 'truth' it could endure—or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. But there is no doubt that for the discovery of certain portions of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more favourably situated and have a greater likelihood of success; not to speak of the wicked who are happy—a species about whom moralists are silent." Friedrich Nietzsche "They have the look of people who have come to the end of things and who have failed to find it amusing. The entire population appear to be eternally in the streets, wandering up and down, with their hands in their pockets, on the lookout for something that never happens. What, indeed, is there to happen? Have they not come to the consummation of everything, of their dreams and their hopes and desires? A man can't have his dream and dream it too." Anna Bowman Dodd "In effect, the Russians, despite their present inefficiency as producers and their low standard of life, have solved the dilemma which Capitalism had found insoluble, and have ensured that every advance in technical efficiency shall be passed on to the consumers in the form of a rising standard of life." George Douglas Howard Cole "In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. Their interest is, in this respect, directly opposite to that of the great body of the people." Adam Smith "We have united the state in such a way that if any part were isolated from the common socialist state, it would not only inflict harm on the latter but would be unable to exist independently and would inevitably fall under foreign subjugation. Therefore, whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities—that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the USSR. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin." Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili "War was the savage impulse; commerce is the civilized calculation. It is clear that the more the commercial tendency dominates, the more the warrior tendency becomes weak. The unique aim of modern nations is tranquility, with tranquility comfort, and, as the source of comfort, industry. War each day becomes a less efficacious means to attain this aim. It does not offer to individuals and to nations benefits which equal the results of peaceful work and regular exchange." Benjamin Constant "Compassion, by its very nature, cannot be touched off by the sufferings of a whole class or a people, or, least of all, mankind as a whole. It cannot reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and still remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering. Its strength hinges on the strength of passion itself, which, in contrast to reason, can comprehend only the particular, but has no notion of the general and no capacity for generalization." Hannah Arendt "If you want to make a man hate you fiercely and forever, prove to him something he does not wish to believe." Olin Miller