+ "No reading is possible for a people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English public, at the moment, to understand any thoughtful writing—so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of avarice." John Ruskin "That which we call fatherland is in America nothing more than security for one's assets. The American knows nothing, seeks nothing but money; he has no ideas; consequently the state is not an intellectual and moral institution (fatherland), but merely a material convention." Nikolaus Lenau "Hitler had little interest in colonies, preferring, along the lines of the American frontier myth, millions of farmers who would settle and develop the area, modernize it, and make it a realm of new beginnings. 'Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,' Hitler declared in the autumn of 1941, while emphasizing that the bloody conquest of the American West provided both historical precedent and justification. 'Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America,' he exulted, whereby an allegedly superior settler population had displaced a supposedly inferior native population, thus opening unlimited economic possibilities. 'Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.'" Stephen Fritz "A lower race needs less room, less clothing, less food, and less culture than a higher race. The German cannot live under the same conditions as the Pole or the Jews. The war must give Germany the foundations on which to build the life that its race and blood demand. More bread, more clothes, more living room, more culture, more beauty—these our race must have or it dies." Robert Ley "Himmler wanted the Ukrainian intelligentsia to be 'decimated'; Göring thought the solution was to kill all Ukrainian males over the age of fifteen and 'send in the SS stallions.' Hitler himself, visiting advance headquarters near Vynnytsya, instructed that Ukrainian education should be restricted to 'one single sentence: the capital of the Reich is Berlin.'" Anna Reid "When I say that in order to have peace this world must be free, I am only reporting that a great process has started which no man—certainly not Hitler—can stop. Men and women all over the world are on the march, physically, intellectually and spiritually. After centuries of ignorant and dull compliance, hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe and Asia have opened the books. Old fears no longer frighten them. They are no longer willing to be eastern slaves for western profits. They are beginning to know that men's welfare throughout the world is interdependent. They are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism within their own society than in the society of nations. The big house on the hill surrounded by mud huts has lost its awesome charm." Wendell Willkie "We never really let the Germans know who won the war. They are being told that their army was stabbed in the back, betrayed, that their army had not been defeated. The Germans never believed they were beaten. It will have to be done all over again." John Joseph Pershing "These are young people who are not willing to go on swallowing frustration and be corrupted by it. It has astonished me to find that Gudrun, who has always thought in a very rational, intelligent way, has experienced what is almost a condition of euphoric self-realisation, a really holy self-realisation such as we find mentioned in connection with saints. To me, that is more of a beacon light than the fire of the arson itself—seeing a human being make her way to self-realisation through such acts." Helmut Ensslin "Mounier advises me in Esprit to give up politics since I have no head for it (this indeed is obvious) and to be satisfied with the quite noble role, which would be so charmingly appropriate to me, of sounding the alarm. But what is a political mind? Reading Esprit doesn't tell me. As to the 'noble' role of sounding the alarm, it would require a spotless conscience. And the only vocation I feel in myself is telling consciences that they are not spotless and reasons for why they lack something." Albert Camus "We should not pull down the blinds, I said, and sit in the parlor with a loaded shotgun, waiting. Isolation was not a realistic course of action. It did not work and it had not been cheap. Appeasement of Soviet ambitions was, in fact, only an alternative form of isolation. It would lead to a final struggle for survival with both our moral and our military positions weakened." Dean Acheson "The taste for philosophy relaxes all the ties of esteem and benevolence that attach men to society, and this is perhaps the most dangerous of the evils that it engenders. The charm of study soon renders insipid every other attachment. What is more, as a consequence of reflecting on humanity, as a consequence of observing men, the philosopher learns to appreciate them at their value, and it is difficult to have much affection for that which one despises. Soon he brings together in his person all the interest that virtuous men share with those like them: his contempt for others is turned to the profit of his pride: his amour propre grows in the same proportion as his indifference regarding the rest of the universe. Family, fatherland become for him words void of sense: he is neither parent, nor citizen, nor man; he is a philosopher." Jean-Jacques Rousseau "The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the eighteenth century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is 'useful,' because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law." Karl Marx "I am convinced that the interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity." Alexis de Tocqueville "While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard‐won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said?" Bruno Latour "We should beware, if pursuing a progressive desire to 'challenge' the national narrative whether by injecting shame and apology, or merely by recovering and celebrating neglected aspects of the past, not to repeat the fundamental vice of Whig history: showing the past as the fumbling attempts of primitive peoples to turn themselves into us. Flattery of the present is an inevitable danger of using history to convey progressive messages, however praiseworthy: for it is we who decide what 'progress' is, and who is accepted into the approved pantheon! In that sense, history is indeed written by the winners—but winners only because we are still here. It is surely essential that children should learn that the past is indeed a foreign country, with different ideas and values from ours: a healthy dose of relativism is essential. Without that, we become incapable of understanding our past or critically assessing the present—because the present and its values seems all there really is." Robert Tombs "Sartre's Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokov's protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger, Meursault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn. These fictional endings all represent where humanity is ending up in reality, a humanity that, if it does not care to be crushed under the machine, must go about in a rhinoceros's skin." Jalal Al-e-Ahmad "For my crowd, a good party means a day of intensive cooking, often not for people we know well already, but for 'people we'd like to know better.' What's on display? Novelty is meant to signal sophistication; cultural capital, sociologists would call it. It's important to impress, all the more so because the dinner party often serves a work purpose as well as a social one; it's designed to cement relationships that will be helpful in developing a career—colleagues or potential clients or customers." Joan Williams "Status and prestige matter to everyone, of course, but they matter to some more than others. Most of all, they matter to those who find themselves in precarious industries where one's reputation counts for a great deal and, just as important, to lonely, unattached people who long to feel valued and desired. Delayed marriage and child-rearing ensure that many more young people spend many more years in the mating market and, by extension, orienting their lives around fulfilling their own social and sexual appetites over the care and feeding of children. This is especially true among children of the culturally powerful upper middle class, who’ve been trained to fear downward mobility in a stratified society as much as our primitive ancestors feared being devoured by toothy predators. The result is what you might call a culture of 'competitive wokeness.'" Reihan Salam "Of course Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult and it emphasizes that we are different rather than how we are similar." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place." Angela Carter "With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when 'it' wishes, and not when 'I' wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject 'I' is the condition of the predicate 'think.' One thinks; but that this 'one' is precisely the famous old 'ego,' is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an 'immediate certainty.'" Friedrich Nietzsche "I once saw a real popular movement in London. People were running excitedly through the streets. Everyone who saw them doing it immediately joined in the rush. They ran simply because everyone else was doing it. It was most impressive to see thousands of people sweeping along at full speed like that. There could be no doubt that it was literally a popular movement. I ascertained afterwards that it was started by a runaway cow. That cow had an important share in my education as a political philosopher; and I can assure you that if you will study crowds, and lost and terrified animals, and things like that, instead of reading books and newspaper articles, you will learn a great deal about politics from them. Most general elections, for instance, are nothing but stampedes." George Bernard Shaw "Imagine if the suffragette movement hadn't included large numbers of women, or if the civil rights movement included very few African Americans, or if the gay rights movement included very few gays. Internal coherence gave all these movements an authentic and potent group identity that helped them persevere in the face of setbacks to eventually achieve significant results. By contrast, the participants of Occupy were not the hungry or exploited, but rather relatively privileged self-identified activists. Which is why when the next big thing to protest came along, Occupy's participants moved on." Amy Chua "Nowadays visitors who want to look at Michelangelo's frescos in the Sistine Chapel and the Capella Paolina, unless they can pull strings and get a private viewing, will be frog-marched through the Vatican Palace amid a chattering throng of selfie-snapping tourists, pushed along between velvet ropes at a rapid walk, looking neither to the right nor to the left, until they reach the Sistine. There they will descend to join a seething mob whose subdued roar is only intermittently stilled by a guard with an amplified megaphone, demanding, with comic incongruity, 'Silenzio!' Michelangelo's art is supremely contemplative, intended to elevate the soul to the sublime and the sacred, but now his finest work is usually glimpsed over bobbing heads amid an infernal hubbub." James Hankins "The much-maligned 'art scene' of the present day is perfectly harmless and even pleasant, if you don't judge it in terms of false expectations. It has nothing to do with those traditional values that we hold high (or that hold us high). It has virtually nothing whatever to do with art. That's why the 'art scene' is neither base, cynical, nor mindless: it is a scene of brief blossoming and busy growth, just one variation on the never-ending round of social game-playing that satisfies our need for communication, alongside such others as sport, fashion, stamp-collecting and cat-breeding. Art takes shape in spite of it all, rarely and always unexpectedly; art is never feasible." Gerhard Richter "In general I would only observe that commerce, consisting in a mutual exchange of the necessaries and conveniences of life, the more free and unrestrained it is the more it flourishes, and the happier are all the nations concerned in it. Most of the restraints put upon it in different countries seem to have been the projects of particulars for their private interest under pretense of public good." Benjamin Franklin "'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded—and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist. Indeed if all needs felt by important groups that can be satisfied only be the exercise of dictatorial powers constitute an emergency, every situation is an emergency situation." Friedrich Hayek "I always want to follow the news, but then I'm so far behind, and now it's just like, what's the point?" Miranda July "Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof." John Henry Newman "The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can't condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced. (Recounting one such denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a friend called Updike 'just a penis with a thesaurus')." Katie Roiphe "The nineteenth-century novel (I use these terms boldly and roughly: of course there were exceptions) was not concerned with the 'human condition,' it was concerned with various individuals struggling in society. The twentieth-century novel is usually either crystalline or journalistic; that is, it is either a small, quasi-allegorical object portraying the human condition and not containing 'characters' in the nineteenth-century sense, or else it is a large shapeless quasi-documentary object, the degenerate descendant of the nineteenth-century novel, telling, with pale conventional characters, some straightforward story enlivened with empirical facts." Iris Murdoch