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"Believe me, our hearts' morality is the only morality we have to lead us, and that disgusting mass of precepts that people no longer read, that derive from I know not what absurd principles, is made only for those gross and clumsy souls incapable of ever attaining to that delicacy of taste which enables a well-born soul to feel all that is lovable in virtue and hateful in vice, independently of the ridiculous reasons advanced by our sages." Charles de Guiffardiere   "Perhaps the music was too good, enabling us to stay indoors and just watch and listen. We altered the world hardly at all because, whatever we told each other, and however connected we might have felt sitting in the same room, the search we were on was for the singular, individual experience. To be sure, it was of the interior kind, the kind you can keep still and have, rather than the current much-desired extreme sports, falling-fast-out-of-the-sky sort. But we had about as much effect on the world as someone jumping from a plane does. The straight world wondered what we were up to. They disapproved, they feared, they sent the cops round, and that was all grist to our other sense that we were doing something. But our interiority, our single focus on our inner selves did not achieve anything very much. No new ideas, no great books or paintings or poetry come to mind from those late Sixties days—just an album cover or two." Jenny Diski   "I don't know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally for an entire year, we heard nothing at all except Angela Davis. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defence of Angela Davis. Although she didn't have too difficult a time in this country's jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents—but more important, a group of Czech dissidents—addressed an appeal to her: 'Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?' Angela Davis answered: 'They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.'" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn   "An old man, dressed in a white peasant smock, like Tolstoy, stepped out and said he wanted to speak. At once the others attempted to hustle and scold him back into the group. He stood his ground, said he had to speak to us. A silence. Oksana was clearly frightened. The old man spoke. Oksana interpreted, and Douglas Young, our Russian speaker, stopped her. 'No, you are not interpreting properly,' he said, blandly, like a professor. The old man addressed him, and Douglas interpreted, while Oksana squeezed her hands together, as if she were praying. 'You must not believe what you are told. Visitors from abroad are told lies.You must not believe what you are shown. Our lives are terrible. The Russian people—I am speaking for the Russian people. You must go back to Britain and tell everybody what I am saying. Communism is terrible—' And he was pulled back by the others and surrounded, but he stood among them with his burning eyes fixed on us, while the others scolded him. That was remarkable—they scolded and fussed at him; they didn't shrink away from a pariah. And throughout the long, toast-filled meal that followed, he sat silent, his eyes on us, while they scolded—affectionately, there was no doubt about that. Yet at that time people vanished into the Gulag for much less than what he had done. No crime could be worse than to say such things to foreigners. He would be arrested and disposed of, and he knew that this would happen." Doris Lessing   "When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can't see what objection one could make to this." Michel Foucault   "Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world." Robert Sapolsky   "Although the original basis of aristocratic power was military prowess, those seeking royal favour or public office had long been expected to have other qualities as well. Medieval romance literature suggests that a high value was set on eloquence, personal charm, conversational skills, and emotional sensitivity. In the later Middle Ages, it was regarded as 'mannerly' for young gentlemen to play the harp, sing, dance, learn languages, read 'books of eloquence,' and be instructed in 'the schools of urbanity and nurture of England.' In the Tudor period, gentlemen aspiring to preferment at court were expected to excel not just at riding, hunting, and fighting, but also in literature, music, dancing, conversation, and all forms of 'courtly behaviour.'" Keith Thomas   "The reason aggressive merito­cracy can be cruel is that it suggests that those who aren't at the top—struggling in the middle, or poor and powerless at the bottom—are supposed to understand that this isn't their misfortune but what they, too, deserve. Meritocracy, taken seriously, is humiliating and offensive to the majority. How could it not be?" Andrew Marr   "It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. The tailor does not attempt to make his own shoes, but buys them of the shoemaker. The shoemaker does not attempt to make his own clothes, but employs a tailor. The farmer attempts to make neither the one nor the other, but employs those different artificers. All of them find it for their interest to employ their whole industry in a way in which they have some advantage over their neighbours, and to purchase with a part of its produce, or what is the same thing, with the price of a part of it, whatever else they have occasion for." Adam Smith   "It was not the people who did away with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It was not the people who needed the death of millions of peasants—most of the people, after all, were peasants. It was not the people who chose, in 1937, to fill the prisons and camps. It was not the people who needed the murderous deportations, the resettlement in Siberia and Central Asia, of the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens and Volga Germans, of Russified Bulgarians and Greeks." Vasily Grossman   "We tend to think of prices as costs, which they are, of course, to potential users of a good. But prices are also potential income to suppliers of a good. And in both cases they are signals. Rising prices are signals to users that a good is becoming more scarce and ought therefore to be employed more sparingly. At the same time they indicate to suppliers that more ought to be produced, if possible. Falling prices emit the opposite signals. Moreover, information about changing scarcities is linked in this system with incentives to act appropriately, to alter one’s behavior so as to accommodate the new social situation. Rising prices not only tell users they ought to be more economical and suppliers that they ought to make more available; rising prices at the same time provide financial incentives to do what ought to be done." Paul Heyne   "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation." Thomas Jefferson   "It is frightening to see a society unleash against its own citizens codes of speech and behavior that can ensnare just about anyone, and that have as their underpinning nothing more than a woman's sense of 'discomfort' around certain phrases or deeds. To conflate this with serious acts of sexual harassment and abuse is to invite totalitarianism—the heavy hand of authority everywhere in the private sphere, until there is virtually no private sphere left. Is this an enactment of the feminist vision? It sounds more like the dystopias we're all familiar with from the novels of Zamyatin and Orwell, in which there is a close correspondence between political control of sexuality and the creation of an atmosphere of hysteria that has as its aim the suppression of the private sphere and the redirecting of individuals' energy toward state goals and definitions." Daphne Patai   "The E.U., it is vital to understand, is undemocratic not by accident, but by design. Politicians in Brussels know that there is no public support for so-called deeper integration. Jean-Claude Juncker, the current president of the E.U. Commission, summed up the decision-making behind the introduction of the single currency thusly: 'We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.'" Marian Tupy   "To begin with, the notion of starting from zero made no sense at all in the United States. The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the First World War. She had emerged from the war on top of the world. She was the only one of the combatants who had not been demolished, decimated, exhausted, or catapulted into revolution. She was now one of the Great Powers, young, on the rise, bursting with vigor and rude animal health. Not only that, she had no monarchy or nobility to be toppled, discredited, blamed, vilified, or otherwise reacted against. She didn't even have a bourgeoisie. In the absence of a nobility or any tradition of one, the European concept of the bourgeoisie didn't apply. (American writers, dazzled by the European stance, imported it anyway, like a pair of Lobb shoes or a jar of Beluga caviar, and began talking about 'the booboisie,' 'Babbitt,' 'boosterism,' and the rest of it.)" Tom Wolfe   "The Nazis spoke of the 'Final Solution.' The German word was Endlösung, suggestive of extermination. It was uttered first in German by Georg Hartmann in 1904, decades before the Third Reich. Hartmann, manager of the Southwest Africa Company, prepared a special report asserting that 'the final solution to the native question can only be to break the power of the natives totally and for all time.' The German word Hartmann used, for the first time as a code word for murder, was 'Endlösung.'" Edwin Black   "In Great Britain at this moment, when half, or perhaps two-thirds, of all the married people are regulating their families, children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and the Polish, Russian and German Jews, on the one hand, and to the thriftless and irresponsible—largely the casual labourers and the other denizens of the one-roomed tenements of our great cities—on the other. Twenty-five per cent of our parents, as Professor Karl Pearson keeps warning us, is producing 50 per cent of the next generation. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews. Finally, there are signs that even these races are becoming influenced. The ultimate future of these islands may be to the Chinese!" Sidney Webb   "We know we have to decarbonize our future. If we don't, it is a horror. People will die. Habitat will be destroyed. Seas will rise. Insects will spread in areas they never have before. This is not a game. It is not politics to talk to your base. It is humanity and whether it makes it through the twenty-first century. California will stay the course." Jerry Brown   "Youth movements are not invariably a good thing. Germany's Hitlerjugend certainly was not. Nor Benito Mussolini's Sons of the Wolf. Nor Stalin's Komsomol. Nor do the young Maoist gangs fill me with confidence and hope." Saul Bellow   "You want, if possible—and there is no more insane 'if possible'—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible—that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?" Friedrich Nietzsche   "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood." William James   "In the book Chinese Village, Socialist State, there are details of what happened in Raoyang county where, only 120 miles south of Peking, temples and town and school walls were dismantled so their bricks could be used to construct kilns in which house gates and pillaged coffins from the rich were burned for fuel. Farmers were drawn from the fields to make useless lumps of metal. In Raoyang the harvest was excellent, but the crops rotted. Among other reasons the sickles had been melted down and the wheat had to be yanked out of the soil by people with bleeding hands. And yet villagers, as elsewhere in China, were compelled to send twice as much grain to the state as the previous year." Jonathan Mirsky   "Though the average man makes more than the average woman, the disparity is reversed when looking at unmarried women versus unmarried men. Based on data compiled from 2,000 urban communities, one study found that the median salary for young, unmarried, childless women is about 8 percent higher than men with the same characteristics. Other cities experienced pay gaps in the double digits, sometimes reaching as high as 20 percent. Further research has shown that unmarried college-educated women between the ages of 40 and 64 earn an average of 17.5 percent more than their male peers." Tyler Curtis   "Unemployment is having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us. Indeed, the effects go deeper—into the very heart of life, into the structure of the family and the souls of men. As Richard Cloward has said: 'Men for whom there are no jobs will nevertheless mate like other men, but they are not so likely to marry. Ours is a society which has preferred to deal with the resulting female-headed families, not by putting men to work, but by placing unwed mothers and children on public welfare—substituting check-writing machines for male wage-earners. By this means we have robbed men of manhood, women of husbands, and children of fathers. To create a stable monogamous family, we need to provide men with the opportunity to be men, and that involves enabling them to perform occupationally.' But this is what we have not done. This simple task—affording men the opportunity to contribute to themselves, to support their families, to contribute to their community—this is the task we have failed to accomplish. Most of all we have failed for the young men of the poverty ghetto, who struggle with unemployment rates of forty and fifty percent and more." Robert Kennedy   "Mr Jobbles had for many years been examining undergraduates for little goes, and great goes, and had passed his life in putting posing questions, in detecting ignorance by viva voce scrutiny, and eliciting learning by printed papers. He, by a stupendous effort of his mathematical mind, had divided the adult British male world into classes and sub-classes, and could tell at a moment's notice how long it would take him to examine them all. His soul panted for the work. Every man should, he thought, be made to pass through some 'go.' The greengrocer's boy should not carry out cabbage unless his fitness for cabbage-carrying had been ascertained, and till it had also been ascertained that no other boy, ambitious of the preferment, would carry them better." Anthony Trollope   "You become less effective as an artist the more interested you become in yourself as a person; and the more you become interested in yourself as a person, the more you're in danger of becoming a fatheaded, lazy artist. Better to wear your hairshirt and hide in a cave than come out and try to be a beautiful person. There are so many beautiful people in the world now—so many in the New York nightclubs and the London clubs—that I don't think a writer should attempt to swell that particular throng. It's one thing to wish your books to be elegant, another to wish to be elegant yourself. I'm all for elegance in the right places, and my concern is to try to be elegant in the books. But I'm not sure that elegance is the supreme human quality we should aspire to. It seems to be like a pear. It goes rotten very quickly. Maybe we need some sturdier virtue, something more like a potato that will keep for months and even a year in the cellar." John Updike   "Novels, if they're doing it right, show us people as they are in their complexity, not as they should be. They can create disorder, using language to free us from the bondage of a particular way of seeing, increasing our autonomy. Disobedience, as every child knows, is a form of freedom, and absolute certainty is a form of madness. Mockery is authority's nightmare, and the return of religion, of the tyrant and strong man, should inspire us to better doubts and more questions, naivety and enquiry. Tyrants seek to heal conflicts by pretending that everything is already decided. They need to be reminded that questions about power, gender, class, sexuality can never be defined once and for all, but are conditional and must be open to experimentation. This is radicalism, which bears no resemblance to the phoney conservative 'radicalism' we've been subject to." Hanif Kureishi   "We would meet either in his study at the Kremlin or, more often, in the Kremlin movie theater. Stalin used to select the movies himself. He liked cowboy movies especially. He used to curse them and give them the proper ideological evaluation but then immediately order new ones." Nikita Khrushchev   "Imagine two men, one with a tendency for jealousy when he senses his partner straying, another who is mellow with whatever goes down. Which one would have more children? The mellow one might well have a happier life, but his partner would be at a higher-than-average risk of becoming pregnant by someone else. That would make her infertile during the pregnancy and for several years more if she breastfeeds the baby. So men who lack jealousy tend to have fewer children than men whose jealousy—obnoxious, dangerous, and aversive as it is to all parties and society—makes such pregnancies less likely." Randolph Nesse   "The Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010 killed 11 rig workers. The fiery wreck of a train hauling crude oil killed 47 residents of a small town in Quebec in 2013. As recently as 2011, the American Lung Association estimated that pollution from coal-fired power plants killed roughly 13,000 Americans each year. Against those numbers, nuclear power's safety record is comparatively pristine. In the US, more workers have died falling off rooftops while installing solar panels than in the entire history of commercial nuclear power." James Meigs