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"Under the tsars, interrogation never involved torture, while under the Soviets it was routine. The tsars never thought of arresting relatives of criminals: Lenin remained free and was accepted to higher education although his brother had been hanged for his role in a conspiracy to murder Tsar Alexander III. The Soviets built camps for 'the wives of the accused,' and 'member of the family of a traitor to the motherland' became a criminal category. In some periods, the children of these traitors were put in orphanages, where most died, while in others they were simply executed. The tsars never conducted arrests at random, but Stalin issued quotas for each district, and Lenin explicitly called for the arbitrary execution of innocent people, since killing the innocent, he explained, would create a terrorized, therefore submissive, population." Gary Saul Morson   "Our cause is sacred. He whose hand will tremble, who will stop midway, whose knees will shake before he destroys tens and hundreds of enemies, he will lead the revolution into danger. Whoever will spare a few lives of enemies, will pay for it with hundreds and thousands of lives of the better sons of our fathers." Nikita Khrushchev   "We are in the Vendée to exterminate this crowd of brigands who have gathered here. Many of them enrol the peasants by force, and tell them they will not die from a musket or cannon shot. They tell them plenty of other lies; well, let them get a hundred paces from me when I have my musket, and we'll see about not dying." François Bravy Benard   "In 1913, in a single pit disaster, 440 men and boys of the village were killed. This was not far short of 10% of the total population. No British community suffered loss on this scale during the Great War. What makes this even more horrifying is that it was the second major disaster to hit the village in a generation: seventy-nine miners had died in 1901. Yet these were just the crescendos in a steady drumbeat of tragic death, inside and outside the mines. Sengennydd was in no way immune to the horrific childhood mortality of working-class Britain; in this too it was well above average. Over 200 children were buried in the Anglican cemetery of the village between 1900 and 1914, and in a predominantly dissenting community this was only part of the toll. Three Llewelyn sisters died in 1905, a son died in 1907; between the great pit disaster and the outbreak of war, three Morris children and their mother died. A smallpox epidemic tore through the village in 1902; in one month, March 1910, eight children died. Before the epidemic was finished twenty-seven children died in Grove Terrace alone." Adrian Gregory   "In most of Europe, landownership was settled, with farms being treated as an inalienable patrimony. In England, by contrast, there was a lively land market from at least the thirteenth century (earlier records are harder to come by). In most of Europe, children would work on their parents' farms, receiving board and lodging rather than wages. In England—to the surprise and occasional disgust of overseas visitors—children would generally have left the family home by their teens, either for apprenticeships or to work elsewhere. The farmwork would instead be done by hired hands for competitive pay. In most of Europe, the family was recognized as the primary unit, not just in custom but in law: parents generally could not disinherit their children, and the family plot was treated as a communal resource. In England, there was almost no notion of shared ownership. A boy who had reached legal maturity was, in the eyes of the law, a wholly free agent: his father had neither claims over him nor duties to him." Daniel Hannan   "How many thousands are there who go to India for twenty years certain in a pestilential climate under a burning sun and for what? Why, to secure themselves (if they live) £400 or £500 a year for the remainder of their lives in England. At the expiration of ten years in New South Wales I shall be much disappointed if we individually are not worth double that sum, arising from the accumulation of our stock and our annual exports to England. For the first year or two we shall have to endure privations and hardships which we have not been accustomed to in England. What of that?" James Henty   "The man who said that the workers had no fatherland disbelieved the evidence of his own country, and died before the intensifying nationalism (as well as the economic conflicts) of the early twentieth century led to what can be more fittingly called the Second Fall of Man, World War I, than any other historical event. Marx ignored all the psychological forces of pride, tradition, cultural autonomy that may lead people to resist modernization and Westernization. One may wonder if the fetish of national independence was worth the nine million lives lost in consequences of the departure of the British Raj, and cite the complaints of the Sikhs, Moslems, Sinhalese, Tamil minority ethnic groups today, that they are less safe in their lives and prosperity since the British left. It would still not serve as a justification for imperial rule imposed on a people that does not want it. Perhaps the best answer to Marx's tribute to the progressive character of British rule was made by an Indian patriot and jurist addressing his British colleagues: 'Yes, you gave us law and justice, roads, public hygiene and hospitals, museums, parks and much else. But you took away what we now value much more, our sense of self-respect.'" Sidney Hook   "All British towns are the growth of centuries. They enshrine local history. They represent the activities, successes, hopes and failures, work and play of the citizens for many generations. The result is 'flavour and character,' though neither the flavour nor the character may appeal at first sight to any but the citizens themselves. Thus shipbuilding, the cotton, the pottery, the mining towns give a very different impression to a visitor when he visits them by himself than when he is shown around by some old resident. There is of course no doubt whatever that many very large areas of British industrial development need regenerating, but it is my strong conviction that this must be done sensitively with and not for or against the citizens themselves." Elizabeth Denby   "The genuine danger to Europe seems to me to be a matter of the spirit, of the importation of American boredom, of that dreadful, quite specific boredom that rises over there from every stone and every house on all the numbered streets. The boredom that does not, like the earlier European variety, come from calmness, from sitting on the park bench playing dominoes and smoking a pipe—a lazy waste of time indeed, but not dangerous. American boredom is restless, nervous, and aggressive; it outruns itself in its frantic haste, seeks numbness in sports and sensations. It has lost its playfulness, scurries along instead in the rabid frenzy of an eternal flight from time. It is always inventing new artifices for itself, like cinema and radio, to feed its hungry senses with nourishment for the masses, and it transforms this common interest in enjoyment into concerns as massive as its banks and trusts." Stefan Zweig   "I chiefly worry about Auden's ethical principles and convictions, not about his technical ability; or rather, I think that if a man's ethical and religious views and convictions are feeble or limited and incapable of development, then his technical development is restricted." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "'Everyone has the right,' Pound often said, 'to have his ideas examined one at a time.' In a similar way, a man afraid of being told he has cancer might ask for his symptoms to be examined one at a time. But while the symptoms taken one by one might not mean much as a syndrome they could mean cancer. And while Pound's ideas taken one by one might not mean much, as an ideology they could mean murder. Pound was gaoled at about the same time Majdanek was liberated. There is no reason to believe that Pound ever knew anything about what had been going on. There is no reason to believe that Pound had any political imagination whatsoever. He thought Mussolini's speeches were pure Brancusi, when even the most solidly fascist Italian intellectuals knew them to be tenth-rate rhetoric; he believed in a Wall Street-Kremlin counter-axis; he recommended The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a source book. To say he lacked imagination is not, of course, to say he lacked enthusiasm. Unfortunately enthusiasm is not intellect." Clive James   "The first coffee house in Marseilles opened in 1671, prompting the city's vintners to recruit a couple of professors at the University of Aix to blacken their new competitor's reputation. They duly got one of their students to write a pamphlet claiming coffee was a vile foreign novelty made from a tree favoured by goats and camels. It burned the blood, dried the kidneys and attracted the lymph, inducing palsies and impotence. 'From all of which we must necessarily conclude that coffee is hurtful to the greater part of the inhabitants of Marseilles.'" Matt Ridley   "Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush—and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn't true that they have any significance—their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash." David Herbert Lawrence   "I am desperate for change—now, not in 8 years or 12 years, but right now. We don't have time to wait. We need big change—not just the shifting of power among insiders. We need to change the game, because the game is broken. When I think about the country I want to give my children, it's not the world we have now. All I have to do is look into the faces of my children, and I realize how much work we need to do." Michelle Obama   "We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave." Blaise Pascal   "At least as far as it touches political discourse, Facebook is not a means of connecting people and enabling relationships. It is a vast online role-playing game played by mediocrities who do not even quite understand what it is they are so angry about and why their daily acts of social-media theater fail to provide the catharsis they desire, leaving them instead only more agitated, anxious, and despairing." Kevin Williamson   "A reputation for toughness may seem at odds with a reputation for co-operation: If people value co-operation, wouldn't they avoid highly aggressive individuals? These two qualities—conferring benefits on others versus imposing costs—have different values in different environments. In environments characterized by social exchange and with central authorities to limit interpersonal conflict, the former will be more important for social success. In environments with intense competition over limited resources, the latter will be more important. When people form alliances to aggressively compete with other alliances, then both are important. Ultimately, the best partners are those who are highly able to confer benefits and impose costs, and are highly willing to selectively confer benefits upon oneself and impose costs on one's rivals." Pat Barclay   "A woman can tell, from a photo of a face, if a man is prone to cheat and divert resources to other women; cheaters tend to look more masculine, but not more attractive. Men are less able to discern female cheaters. Indeed, as moose and beetles demonstrate, males with little investment sometimes fail to discern females from bottles or statues." Donald Hoffman   "To make the matter clear, let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the distinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of the water is the indistinct, the feelings, the after-sensation of perceptions and intuitions and what is experienced in general, mingled with the disposition of our own will that is the kernel of our inner nature. Now this mass of the whole consciousness is more or less, in proportion to intellectual liveliness, in constant motion, and the clear pictures of the imagination, or the distinct, conscious ideas expressed in words, and the resolves of the will are what come to the surface in consequence of this motion. The whole process of our thinking and resolving seldom lies on the surface, that is to say, seldom consists in a concatenation of clearly conceived judgments; although we aspire to this, in order to be able to give an account of it to ourselves and others." Arthur Schopenhauer   "You know right away with Gore that his philosophical ideas were not worked up for him by speechwriters. Asked which thinkers he had been influenced by in his brief career as a divinity student, he mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Edmund Husserl. Would that be Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception? Yes, he said, with a flicker (just a flicker) of excitement—did I know it? He had found the work helpful, he said, 'in cultivating a capacity for more refined introspection that gave me better questions that ultimately led to a renewed determination to become involved with the effort to make things better.'" Louis Menand   "I paid no particular attention to self-preservation. But luckily—or perhaps not too luckily—this is cornucopia-time, an era of abundance in all civilized nations. Never, on the material side, have huge populations been better protected from hunger and sickness. And this partial release from the struggle for survival makes people naïve. By this I mean their wishful fantasies are unchecked. You begin, in accordance with an unformulated agreement, to accept the terms, invariably falsified, on which others present themselves. You deaden your critical powers. You stifle your shrewdness. Before you know it you are paying a humongous divorce settlement to a woman who had more than once declared that she was an innocent who had no understanding of money matters." Saul Bellow   "I've heard that even now, in our most virtuous age, the practice of adultery is not unknown. Only we have less excuse. In Couples, one of the characters floats the idea that in the future televisual surveillance will make adultery impossible. 'My God,' another remarks. 'They'll undermine the institution of marriage.' That may be funny, but it's not a joke. Updike and his friends were too old not to marry young. (He had been 21, and had four children by the time he was 29.) The sexual adventurism that people take for granted now, as part of an extended singlehood, they could only experience after marriage." William Deresiewicz   "Farming is a sunup-to-sundown occupation, and though foragers hunt and gather just a few hours a day, they spend many more hours processing the food (for example, smashing rock-hard nuts), in addition to gathering firewood, carrying water, and laboring at other chores. The San of the Kalahari, once called 'the original affluent society,' turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone." Steven Pinker   "Conventional thinking suggests that banning single-use plastic bags will result in people using reusable bags, and that this reduction in plastic use will have a positive impact on the environment. Research from Denmark's Ministry of the Environment actually challenged that conventional wisdom when it sought to compare the total impact of plastic bags to their reusable counterparts. The Danes found that alternatives to plastic bags came with significant negative externalities. For example, common paper bag replacements needed to be reused 43 times to have the same total impact as a plastic bag. When it came to cotton alternatives, the numbers were even higher. A conventional cotton bag alternative needed to be used over 7,100 times to equal a plastic bag, while an organic cotton bag had to be reused over 20,000 times." David Clement   "We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion." Paul Watson   "'The first casualty of these flying Balkan bullets is the status quo,' an Austrian general bitterly noted. A status quo that had benefited Vienna suddenly lay 'dead as a mouse,' Mausetot. Within Austrian military circles, the solution to the Balkan crisis seemed clear. 'Let's let this thing explode into war,' General Appel scribbled from Sarajevo. 'What do we have to fear? Russia? They won't do anything, and we need to smash the Serbs once and for all.'" Geoffrey Wawro   "Life was to be made unbearable by destroying homes and disrupting supplies. The City of London, the financial and commercial heart of the nation and empire, was to be obliterated. After the first raid, a German newspaper, the Neuste Nachrichten of Leipzig, said: The City of London, the heart that pumps the vital life blood of the brutal huckster nation, has been sown with the bombs by the German Airships whose brave pilots had the satisfaction of seeing the dislocated fragments rise up to the dark skies in lurid tongues of flame. While the spirit of the people of London was never even close to breaking as a result of the Zeppelin raids, they did suffer grievous casualties and a great deal of distress. Over the preceding century, Londoners had become conditioned to thinking of war as something that happened in distant lands and they would remain protected from harm, safe in their island fortress, well away from the horrors of the battlefield. The first Zeppelin raid destroyed this concept and for the first time since the Civil War, civilians were directly in the firing line and their morale under threat." Ian Jones   "In reference to the Southwest African Herero, a Reichstag member in 1904 suggested to his colleagues: 'Do not apply too much humanity to bloodthirsty beasts in the form of humans.' Even more compelling as antecedents of later Nazi turns of phrase, a government geologist wrote that 'the "final solution" to the native question can only be to break the power of the natives totally and for all time,' and Commissioner for Settlement Paul Rohrbach speculated that, 'To secure the peaceful white settlement against the bad, culturally inept and predatory native tribe, it is possible that its actual eradication may become necessary.'" Gerald Scott Waterman   "There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776." Franklin Roosevelt   "Men and women have been asked to sacrifice everything for victory; it is, therefore, they who should be the winners. For France in particular, where disaster and treason have disqualified most of the leaders and the privileged classes and where the great masses of the common people have, on the other hand, remained the most valiant and the most faithful, it would no longer be acceptable that the terrible trials leave in power the social and moral regime which was active against the nation. Fighting France intends that victory shall be for the benefit of everyone of her children. Strong in her restored national independence, security and grandeur, she desires that each Frenchman be assured and guaranteed liberty, security, and human dignity." Charles de Gaulle   "There are few words which are used more loosely than the word 'Civilization.' What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is Civilization—and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort, and culture. When Civilization reigns, in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all." Winston Churchill