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"These travels by steam keep on shaking the world—in which there really is nothing left but railway stations—like a kaleidoscope, incessantly, the landscapes speeding by in ever-changing grimaces even before one has been able to perceive any genuine traits of physiognomy; the flying salon presents one with ever new coteries, even before one has been able to really deal with the old ones." Joseph von Eichendorff   "Americans have about $1.1 trillion of outstanding auto debt, not that far from that $1.6 trillion in student loans, but without already-generous government repayment subsidies. If you wouldn't claim that Toyota Corollas are imposing a grievous, unsupportable burden on the nation's youth, then you probably shouldn't make similar claims about student loans." Megan McArdle   "Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty-seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task." Daniel Levitin   "As the economy came into balance and as demand was restored, Wallace observed, 'we can take off the brakes and step on the gas.' The 'enforced meanness' of modern society would surely become in time insupportable; the 'hard, hopeless' economics of Adam Smith would fade away, and a new Economics of Potentialities would arise. 'Only the merest quarter-turn of the heart separates us from a material abundance beyond the fondest dreams of anyone present,' he told a Des Moines audience in 1933. A new social machinery was in the making if only people could maintain sweet and kindly hearts toward each other." Arthur Schlesinger   "The tyrants of antiquity—Cleisthenes of Sicyon, Cypselus and Periander of Corinth, Peisistratus and Hippias of Athens, Polycrates of Samos, Hiero of Syracusa, and the like—were not especially ambitious, and the same can be said for the despots of medieval and Renaissance Italy. They desired power and glory, to be sure, and not infrequently they were great builders. They delighted in projecting power abroad; and in Greece, as Aristotle points out, they were exceedingly wary of domestic opposition. Men of distinction and 'high thoughts' they sidelined or killed. Dining clubs and education they sought to eliminate. They did what they could to isolate citizens from one another and to sow distrust, and they employed spies—even to the point of encouraging women to inform on their husbands and slaves to report on the conversations of their masters. But they did not aspire to be lawgivers, and they interfered minimally with the lives of those who posed no threat to their rule. True ambition was left to Lycurgus, Solon, and the like—which is to say, to the founders of republics." Paul Rahe   "In a free society, the government does not take the lead in shaping the citizens. Self-governing citizens are mostly shaped in that space between the individual and the state—that space where family, civil society, religion, culture, and the economy form our dispositions and proclivities. And the simultaneous invasion of that space by government and imposition on that space by government makes it very difficult for those forming institutions to function. Liberal democracy has always depended upon a kind of person it does not produce, and which must be formed by institutions that are not themselves liberal or political, but that are given room to function within our liberal society." Yuval Levin   "Bureaucrats cannot help becoming 'rent-seekers' (Gordon Tullock's term), in just the same way that entrepreneurs cannot help becoming profit-maximisers. It is their occupational deformation to regard the size, financial resources and morale of their department as intimately connected with the public good. This phenomenon is so familiar to us in all the other institutions in which we have our daily being that we take it for granted that it must apply to the public service too; it is only the political reformer to whom these things come as a surprise, because he has never considered precisely how the governmental enterprise for which he has been so enthusiastically campaigning would operate in concrete reality: how it would maintain its authority, its access to public finance, its area of operations, and hence how its staff would be motivated and what would be their priorities." Ferdinand Mount   "Debt relief for student loan borrowers, of course, only benefits those who have gone to college, and those who have gone to college generally fare much better in our economy than those who don't. So any student-loan debt relief proposal needs first to confront a simple question: Why are those who went to college more deserving of aid than those who didn't? More than 90 percent of children from the highest-income families have attended college by age 22 versus 35 percent from the lowest-income families. Workers with bachelor's degrees earn about $500,000 more over the course of their careers than individuals with high school diplomas. That's why about 50 percent of all student debt is owed by borrowers in the top quartile of the income distribution and only 10 percent owed by the bottom 25 percent. Indeed, the majority of all student debt is owed by borrowers with graduate degrees." Adam Looney   "Historically, when parts of America experienced outsized economic success, they built enormous amounts of housing. New housing allowed thousands of Americans to participate in the productivity of that locality. Between 1880 and 1910, bustling Chicago's population grew by an average of 56,000 each year. Today, San Francisco is one of the great capitals of the information age, yet from 1980 to 2010, that city's population grew by only 4200 people per year." Ed Glaeser   "While plants bask in solar energy, and a few creatures of the briny deep soak up the chemical broth spewing from cracks in the ocean floor, animals are born exploiters: they live off the hard-won energy stored in the bodies of plants and other animals by eating them. So do the viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens and parasites that gnaw at bodies from the inside. With the exception of fruit, everything we call 'food' is the body part or energy store of some other organism, which would just as soon keep that treasure for itself. Nature is a war, and much of what captures our attention in the natural world is an arms race. Prey animals protect themselves with shells, spines, claws, horns, venom, camouflage, flight, or self-defense; plants have thorns, rinds, bark, and irritants and poisons saturating their tissues. Animals evolve weapons to penetrate these defenses: carnivores have speed, talons, and eagle-eyed vision, while herbivores have grinding teeth and livers that detoxify natural poisons." Steven Pinker   "A play, even a comedy, depends on opposition, and opposition can be murderous. Opposition has to be resolved, either in mourning or in laughter, and this is what makes plot. The bland novels of Jane Austen, or of Barbara Pym, depend on civilised opposition which can be resolved through reason; it requires immense artistic integrity to contrive a plot in which opposition sizzles without a blow being struck. Physical violence is the monopoly, at least in our own age, of the inferior artist." Anthony Burgess   "A study of coroners' rolls from the 1340s suggests a homicide rate of 120 per 100,000 of the population—compared with around 1 per 100,000 of the population today for England, Wales and Scotland, meaning you were 100 times more likely to be murdered in medieval Oxford than you are in modern Britain. And homicide in fourteenth-century Oxford, for both perpetrators and victims, was an overwhelmingly male affair, whereas now a third of all homicide victims are women." James Sharpe   "The state of the dogs of Varanasi was a source of constant, horrified fascination to all visitors. But in a city full of mangy dogs, one was unquestionably the mangiest, the worst in show. He hung out near Manikarnika and was covered in sores that rendered him incapable of sitting still. Instead he contrived ingenious ways to scratch various parts of his body. By 'various parts of,' I mean 'entire.' Even his tail was raw. Practising a form of kundalini yoga, he gripped his tail in his jaws and dragged it through his teeth as if trying to skin it. Head and ears he scratched with a back leg. His back he rubbed against the step behind him. His existence consisted of the awful Samsara of itching and scratching, itching and scratching. Fur had disappeared completely in places, leaving huge patches of pink, horribly human-looking skin. It was as if a botched reincarnation had taken place, as if the dog he were destined to become was still partly the human he had been—or vice-versa." Geoff Dyer   "Is it possible that what men consider enigmatic in women is actually agency? As in: If she does not want me, what the hell does she want? In room after room at the Louvre we will find painted women receptive to our gaze, applying for it, offering themselves up for judgement, whether it is the judgement of Paris or Cupid or Brian who just this minute got off the Eurostar. But the most famous portrait in the place, the exceptional portrait, is the one of the woman who doesn't appear to want our gaze or need it or even to know we're there. The woman who is in her own world, occupied with her own unknowable thoughts, though she is every hour surrounded by iPhone-wielding tourists. The woman who has ceased to be—or never was—concerned with whether or not you are looking at her. The woman with other things on her mind. Who has, precisely, mind!" Zadie Smith   "He who would scheme and project for others will find an opponent in every person who is disposed to scheme for himself. Like the winds that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations of men. The crowd of mankind are directed in their establishments and measures by the circumstances in which they are placed; and seldom are turned from their way, to follow the plan of any single projector. Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design." Adam Ferguson   "It was common for New Dealers to point to, and draw upon, the unprecedented co-ordination of industry by the War Industries Board—the federal agency created in 1917 to organize the provision of war supplies—as a favorable precedent for the massive federal intervention into the economy that they wished to bring about. They also tended to invoke the admirable spirit of co-operation and solidarity that the wartime effort had inspired in the American people, citing it as evidence of what was possible even in peacetime with sufficiently enlightened leadership. Indeed, in creating the Civilian Conservation Corps—the public-works relief program established in 1933 to employ jobless young men—President Franklin Roosevelt predicted that 'the moral and spiritual value' of the corpsmen's work would far exceed its economic value. The sublimating force of a moral equivalent of war would bring not merely material improvement and greater social cohesion, but the spiritual renewal of the nation." Wilfred McClay   "Every one of us will soon be able to see, and cast judgment upon, every other. We'll see what He sees. We'll articulate His judgment. We'll channel His wrath and deliver His forgiveness. On a constant and global level. All religion has been waiting for this, when every human is a direct and immediate messenger of God's will." Dave Eggers   "At church, I'm one thing. At work, I'm something else. I'm something else at home or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one's identities in other domains? That is what it is to be free." Elizabeth Anderson   "There has always been the desire to be worshipped and the desire to worship." Mao Zedong   "We would not be doing our job if we didn't take into account that this president and his policies are crucial to the lives and welfare of the majority of women in this country. That's not bending over backwards: that's being sensible. Having said that, if Clinton had raped women, beaten up Hillary—real private sins would not be forgiven, no matter what the value of the public behavior." Gloria Steinem   "The path of history is in fact not that of a billiard ball, which, once struck, follows a predictable course, but resembles rather the path of a cloud, which also follows the laws of physics but is equally influenced by something that can only be called a coinciding of facts." Robert Musil   "Take away borders, and people begin to identify themselves not by territory and law, but by tribe, race or religion. Nationality is composed of land, together with the narrative of its possession. It is this form of territorial loyalty that has enabled people in Western democracies to exist side by side, respecting each other's rights as citizens, despite radical differences in faith, and without any bonds of family, kinship or long-term local custom to sustain the solidarity between them. For on the foundation of territorial attachment it has been possible to build a kind of civic patriotism, which acknowledges institutions and laws as shared possessions, and which can extend a welcome to those who have entered the social contract from outside. You cannot immigrate into a tribe, a family or a faith; but you can immigrate into a country, provided you are prepared to obey the rules that make that country into a home." Roger Scruton   "I no longer love Paris, partly because it is disfiguring and Americanizing itself, partly because I need it less." Rainer Maria Rilke   "Kierkegaard mistrusted journalism because he thought it would feed our love of the ephemeral, and he was no doubt right about this. Hegel remarked that in his time, newspapers were replacing morning prayer. Perhaps the earliest writer to regard our involvement with daily events as a pathology distracting us from the realities of the human condition was Pascal. As journalism in the contemporary world has extended its range, it has certainly taken in churchly events and concerned itself with the beliefs of different religions, but the very context of such news robs it of the superior status it has for believers, and diminishes religion to the same level as the vast miscellany of other human activities that are also being reported. Religions are composed of archetypes that have a status above the constant flow of ideas and news stories. We respond (or do not respond) to such archetypes in a reflective manner that determines how we view the world, but where journalism dominates our thoughts, reflectiveness is diluted by the passion for novelty. We move from an article on religion to one on fashion, sport, or public affairs. Like democracy, journalism is a manic equalizer." Kenneth Minogue   "It is an anxious moment but we have great confidence in Lord Canning and in General Anson and trust to hear soon of the fall of Delhi. Still I fear there is a dangerous spirit amongst the Native Troops and that a fear of their religion being tampered with is at the bottom of it. I think that the greatest care ought to be taken not to interfere with their religion—as once a cry of that kind is raised amongst a fanatical people—very strictly attached to their religion—there is no knowing what it may lead to and where it may end." Alexandrina Victoria   "The Roman Republic did not encourage its leaders to seek complete and total political victory. It was not designed to force one side to accept everything the other wanted. Instead, it offered tools that, like the American filibuster, served to keep the process of political negotiation going until a mutually agreeable compromise was found. This process worked very well in Rome for centuries, but it worked only because most Roman politicians accepted the laws and norms of the Republic. They committed to working out their disputes in the political arena that the republic established rather than through violence in the streets. Republican Rome succeeded in this more than perhaps any other state before or since." Edward Watts   "Our problem is that our concept of freedom, at least in its political aspects, is inconceivable outside of plurality, and this plurality includes not only different ways but different principles of life and thought. A universal society can only signify a threat to freedom." Hannah Arendt   "I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They're not debating it in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities, in a way that will transform their lives and ours. Yes, both nations still have millions living in poverty. But they are on the move. Or look at Vietnam or Thailand. Then wait for the South Americans, and in time, with our help, the Africans. All these nations have labour costs a fraction of ours. All can import the technology. All of them will attract capital as it moves, trillions of dollars of it, double what was available even 10 years ago, to find the best return. The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change." Tony Blair   "A 1539 proclamation limited discussion and reading of Scripture to graduates of Oxford and Cambridge universities, and the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion dictated that 'No women nor artificers, 'prentices, journeymen, servingmen of the degrees of yeomen or under, husbandmen nor labourers' were permitted to read the English Bible. Thomas Cranmer proposed to confiscate heretical texts and prosecute Bible readers, and at least twenty people were burned for discussing heresy between 1539 and 1546." Jonathan Rose   "A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere. In Lissagaray's History of the Commune there is an interesting passage describing the shootings that took place after the Commune had been suppressed. The authorities were shooting the ringleaders, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class would be the ringleaders. An officer walked down a line of prisoners, picking out likely-looking types. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he 'had an intelligent face.' I should not like to be shot for having an intelligent face, but I do agree that in almost any revolt the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their aitches." Eric Blair