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"In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody—was it Burke?—called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by journalism." Oscar Wilde   "To marry two persons together that are of contrary dispositions, unsuitable tempers, disproportioned years, and the like, is like the way of punishing malefactors in Persia, viz. tying the living body to a dead corpse, till the rotting carcase poisoned the living, and then they rotted together." Daniel Defoe   "If we aspire to a rational mind set, we try to align our opinions with the facts we encounter in the external world. But emotional reasoning demands we do just the opposite: We believe that our subjective state—fear, anxiety, anger—should define external reality. For example, young people schooled to be alert for 'microaggressions' are being encouraged 'to start with their feelings and then justify those feelings by drawing the conclusion that someone has committed an act of aggression against them.' If we feel that someone's opinions have traumatized us, then, by definition, that person has done us harm." James Meigs   "How else is error to be corrected, if not by the informed reason of dissent? Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited." Robert Kennedy   "I think it was Bismarck who believed that governing was an art, and I think, in my case: governing is as much an art as painting pictures or composing string quartets. The object of this political art, the material with which this political art is supposed to work, is society, the state, humanity." Kurt Eisner   "The Germans imprisoned survivors in a camp on an island. The Herero population was reduced from some 80,000 to about 15,000; that of the Nama from about 20,000 to about 10,000. For the German general who pursued these policies, the historical justice was self-evident. 'The natives must give way,' he said. 'Look at America.' The German governor of the region compared Southwest Africa to Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado. The civilian head of the German colonial office saw matters much the same way: 'The history of the colonization of the United States, clearly the biggest colonial endeavor the world has ever known, had as its first act the complete annihilation of its native peoples.'" Timothy Snyder   "The natives must give way—look at America. Either via the bullet or the mission, with alcohol." Lothar von Trotha   "Company policy had been professed from its founding as a 'perfect toleration' of the various Indian religions 'to protect the followers of each in the undisturbed enjoyment of their respective opinions and usages; neither to interfere with them ourselves, nor suffer them to be molested by others.' Commerce lay at the root of this claim since it was thought that Company revenues depended on a basically undisturbed Indian population. There were, all the same, Christian missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, well before the charter of 1813 called for an Anglican bishopric in Calcutta. Portuguese, Germans, and Danes had been proselytizing since the sixteenth century and unsanctioned English-speaking missionaries, largely Baptists, had followed them. None had been obviously successful in making converts." Barbara Groseclose   "The socialist revolution has already begun in Europe and is already firmly established in many countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. The crucial principle of our foreign policy should be to protect, assist, encourage, and aid in every way the socialist revolution wherever it appears. The Labour Party must be extremely alert and vigilant in judging its friends and enemies in Europe. It is quite easy for a person like myself who has spent the last three years in Europe to tell who are our friends and who are our enemies. The upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent." Denis Healey   "To Atta, the French planners' imposition of modernist urbanism on this 'Islamic-Oriental city' wasn't just architecturally ugly—it undermined the traditional Islamic culture of the neighborhood. So did globalization, an economic force of impersonal, mechanistic transactions that bestows inordinate power on wealthy, non-Muslim countries. (In his thesis, Atta worries that Syria's pro-market reforms coupled with a possible Middle East peace deal could give Israel, the most developed economy in the region, a dominant role in Syrian commerce.) By rebuilding the physical structures of the neighborhood, Atta felt he could purge the neighborhood of foreign influence, not just foreign architecture. In the tiny market stalls he sketched (to replace the modern structures he planned to raze), business would be inextricably linked to merchant-customer relationships, a bulwark against globalization. To preserve Islamic traditions and revive a sense of social solidarity, Atta calls for the creation of a 'culture committee' to organize events such as a night of poetry to recount tales of the neighborhood's illustrious past." Daniel Brook   "The artificial is everywhere; everywhere food is adulterated, filled with ingredients that supposedly make it last longer, or look better, or pass as 'enriched,' or whatever else the industry's admen want us to believe." Heinrich Himmler   "The German people's prospects are hopeless. Neither the present living space nor that achieved by a restoration of the borders of 1914 will allow us to lead a life analogous to that of the American people. If we want this, either our people's territory must be considerably enlarged, or the German economy will again have to embark on paths already known to us since the pre-war period. Power is necessary in both cases. Specifically, first of all, in the sense of a restoration of our people's inner strength, and then in a military mounting of this strength." Adolf Hitler   "He uses the Great Depression to come to power. He presents himself precisely as a German nationalist who is going to get the German economy going, who is going to bring Germans inside the borders of Germany. That's how he presents himself, but that is a lie. He's quite consciously manipulating German national sentiment to get to power and then to start the war, which he thinks will transform the Germans, as it were, from a nation into a race. So he's aware that German nationalism is a force in the world, but he's just using it in order to create the world that he wants, which is this world of racial struggle. And he's actually pretty explicit about that, which is pretty striking. So he knows that the Germans care about Germany, but he doesn't." Timothy Snyder   "On this side of the glass, everyone is puzzlingly different from the way we read about them on the other side—Bill Clinton most of all. Amid the clichés about his charm, his glamour is undersung. For those of us who had dismissed him as a garrulous, blow-dried, lip-biting occupant of the oval orifice, this comes as a slight shock. Forget for a moment all the Beltway halitosis breathed upon his image. Forget the dog-in-the-manger, down-in-the-mouth neo-puritanism of the op-ed tumbrel drivers, and see him instead as his guests do: a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex). As the President of the United States walks with Hillary and the Blairs into the State Dining Room, his height, his sleekness, his newly cropped, iron-filing hair, and the intensity of his blue eyes project a kind of avid inclusiveness that encircles every jaded celebrity he passes. He is vividly in the present tense and dares you to join him there." Tina Brown   "He is tall, hulking, with a large-cut face, shocks of dark brown hair and blazing green and blue flecked eyes; he wears the same old clothes all the time: a thick black sweater and wine-stained khaki pants. His voice is richer and rarer than Dylan Thomas, booming through walls and doors: he stalks into the room and yanks a book out of my cases: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thomas, and begins to read. He reads his own poems which are better than Thomas and Hopkins many times, better than all I know: fierce, disciplined, with a straight honest saying. He tells me endless stories, in the Irish spinning way, dropping his voice to a hush and acting some out, and I am enchanted: such a yarn-spinner. He is 25 and from Yorkshire, and has done everything in the world: rose-grafting, plowing, reading for movie studios, hunting, fishing; he reads horoscopes, knows Joyce, so much more than I, but all I love. He is a violent Adam, and his least gesture is like a derrick; unruly, yet creative as God speaking the world; he was a discus thrower." Sylvia Plath   "There are many flattering things a man may say to a woman in the process of courtship, but few quite so romantic as 'I'll risk impeachment to sleep with you.' It would be a rare young woman who could resist such a heartfelt endorsement of her charms, not to mention a chance to sleep with a man who is (a) the President and (b) a babe." Larissa MacFarquhar   "I don't mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for consummation. That seems to me to be a commonplace and to be therefore a matter needing no comment at all. It is a thing, with all its accidents, that must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you take it for granted that the characters have their meals with some regularity. But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist." Ford Madox Ford   "Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished. The field rat's inherited image of the hawk's silhouette is the classic example—even a paper silhouette drawn across a cage sends it rushing frantically for cover. And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet's dominant life form." James Graham Ballard   "What counts is the surviving object and our living response to it. The tests are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, spur the mind to reflection and move the heart; further, is an apparent level of skill involved? Much current fashionable art bothers only the eye and briefly the brain, but fails to engage the mind and heart. It may, to use the old dichotomy, be beautiful, but it is rarely true to any significant depth. (On this subject, by the way, we should follow not Keats but Larkin: 'I have always believed that beauty is beauty, truth truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know.')" Julian Barnes   "There are plenty of people to admire the noble ruins of antiquity, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. I, it seems, belong to a tiny perverse minority who prefer the ignoble ruins of the day before yesterday, and would rather wander through an abandoned army camp or the remains of a world's fair than visit Pompeii or Chan-Chan. Perhaps it is simply that, in the former instance, one's sense of impermanence is stronger. What was there, on this shore, a hundred years ago? Practically nothing. And which, of all these flimsy structures, will be standing a hundred years from now? Probably not a single one. Well, I like that thought. It is bracingly realistic. In such surroundings, it is easier to remember and accept the fact that you won't be here, either." Christopher Isherwood   "I am no more neutral in this war than the Hon. Winston Churchill or Gen. Joseph Joffre. Convinced, after long and prayerful consideration, that the Germans are wholly right, and that they deserve to win, and that they will win, I go, as the saying is, the whole hog. That is to say, I swallow not only the Germans themselves, but also and more especially the Kaiser, and not only the Kaiser, but also the whole war machine." Henry Louis Mencken   "Nine-tenths of the nation, ninety per cent of people, ninety-five percent of people, are absolute fools, and they're bigger fools about painting than anything else. Because it's a terribly rare thing for people to feel anything about painting. They can feel, oddly enough, about music, they can feel even about the theatre. But hardly anyone really feels about painting; they read things into it—even the most intelligent people—they think they understand it, but very, very few people are aesthetically touched by painting." Francis Bacon   "Comparing the owner with the Rembrandt on his walls, one is conscious of an awful discrepancy, an injustice of fate that has brought these two together like an ill-assorted couple. The owner, alas, is not worthy of his possession. Yet we would not feel that about a magnificent Rolls-Royce, though we might faintly envy its possession, or about one of Mr Onassis's yachts. Or Jackie's clothes and jewelry. One may despise all those things or half-wish one had them, at least to try on, but there is no virtue in them, no magical property that we sense as communicable, no aura beyond that of wealth, of which they are the outward signs." Mary McCarthy   "Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing's motive wasn't to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript for varsity letters to show people." David Foster Wallace   "I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs. For it's never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It's always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it's I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really mine is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life." Fernando Pessoa   "The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes." William James   "The frontal lobes are the last part of the brain to develop as we progress through childhood and adolescence, and the first part of the brain to atrophy as we age. Atrophy of the frontal lobes does not diminish intelligence, but it degrades brain areas responsible for inhibiting irrelevant or inappropriate thoughts. Research suggests that this is why older adults have greater difficulty finding the word they're looking for—and why there is a greater likelihood of them voicing ideas they would have previously suppressed." William von Hippel   "YouTube wants to maximize how much time you spend. And so what do they do? They autoplay the next video. And let's say that works really well. They're getting a little bit more of people's time. Well, if you're Netflix, you look at that and say, well, that's shrinking my market share, so I'm going to autoplay the next episode. But then if you're Facebook, you say, that's shrinking all of my market share, so now I have to autoplay all the videos in the newsfeed before waiting for you to click play. So the internet is not evolving at random. The reason it feels like it's sucking us in the way it is is because of this race for attention. We know where this is going. Technology is not neutral, and it becomes this race to the bottom of the brain stem of who can go lower to get it." Tristan Harris