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"For a couple of generations, educators have taken as obvious that their purpose is to enhance young people's self-esteem, and that extreme self-esteem is tantamount to redemption. A couple of generations of Americans who grew up in those schools learned that having their self-esteem damaged is tantamount to being violently victimized. Combine this with the awareness that disagreeable views damage your self-esteem, and you make sense of the demand to purge environments—whether craft websites or college campuses—of dissent." Crispin Sartwell   "Political correctness is a regime of institutionalized insecurity, both moral and material. Seemingly solid careers are subject to sud­den reversal, along with one's status as a decent person. Contrast such a feeling of being precarious with the educative effect of voluntary associations and collaborative rule-making, as marveled at by Tocqueville. Americans' practice of self-government once gave rise to a legitimate pride—the pride of being a grown-up in a free society." Matthew Crawford   "The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, 'Your verb here does not agree with your subject.' That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for 'formal' writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man." Anthony Esolen   "A more exacting drama would work in twists and doubts: if Tom were not entirely innocent, or if there were some ambiguity about whether he had carried out the attack, the courtroom drama might be gripping. But Tom lost the use of his left arm in a cotton gin accident many years ago and couldn't have choked Mayella with both hands nor hit her with his left fist. Somehow the citizens of the town where Tom is well known, and even the family for which Tom has repeatedly done chores, are unaware that his left arm is useless. He's been doing work for everybody for years with one arm and nobody noticed? Preposterous. A witness who takes the stand in Tom's defense about the arm injury is cross-examined about the defendant's character and drinking habits to impugn his credibility, as though any of that would matter: in a burg like Maycomb, where everyone knows his neighbors, everyone would already know about poor Tom's arm. Failing that, the mangled arm could simply be displayed to the jury. As a trial drama, To Kill a Mockingbird wouldn’t pass muster in the writer’s room of the most routine television courtroom saga." Kyle Smith   "In one of Grimm's fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety. We will let the adventurer pursue his journey without concerning ourselves about whether he encountered the terrible on his way. However, I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate." Soren Kierkegaard   "There is a crack of doubt in the soul of every collector. In it lurks the basilisk whose gaze paralyzes taste: the fear that today's klutz may turn out to be tomorrow's Picasso. Thus nothing except the manifestly out-of-date may be rejected with impunity." Robert Hughes   "It is a mistake to believe that the young fellow who goes to the big city is made of poorer stuff than his brother who continues to make an honest living from the peasant sod. No, on the contrary: experience shows that all those elements which emigrate consist of the healthiest and most energetic natures, rather than conversely." Adolf Hitler   "The war is taking many forms: cuts in current funding, elimination of programs, withdrawal of guarantees and block grants in the name of state flexibility. If the wrong side wins in this war on children, fallout from this war will reach far beyond the $40 billion in cuts in children's programs over the next five years. Far beyond Barney and Big Bird and school lunches; far beyond summer jobs and aid for children with disabilities. What will be lost is our notion of who we are as a people and what we stand for as a society." Hillary Clinton   "Has any benefit or progress ever been achieved by the human race by submission to organized and calculated violence? As we look back over the long story of the nations we must see that, on the contrary, their glory has been founded upon the spirit of resistance to tyranny and injustice, especially when these evils seemed to be backed by heavier force. Since the dawn of the Christian era a certain way of life has slowly been shaping itself among the Western peoples, and certain standards of conduct and government have come to be esteemed. After many miseries and prolonged confusion, there arose into the broad light of day the conception of the right of the individual; his right to be consulted in the government of his country; his right to invoke the law even against the State itself. Independent Courts of Justice were created to affirm and enforce this hard-won custom. Thus was assured throughout the English-speaking world, and in France by the stern lessons of the Revolution, what Kipling called, 'Leave to live by no man's leave underneath the law.' Now in this resides all that makes existence precious to man, and all that confers honour and health upon the State." Winston Churchill   "Put simply, it was much more dangerous to be black in 1972 than it was in 1965, whereas it was not much more dangerous to be white. Lest this be thought an abstraction, consider the odds. Arnold Barnett and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have calculated that, at 1970 levels of homicide, a person who lived his life in a large American city ran a greater risk of being murdered than an American soldier in the Second World War ran of being killed in combat. If this analysis were restricted to the ghettos of large American cities, the risk would be some orders of magnitude larger yet, and larger than it had been ten years before." Charles Murray   "When The Lancet published a study in 2010 showing global maternal mortality falling, advocates for women's health tried to pressure it into delaying publication 'fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause,' The New York Times reported. The announcement by NASA in 2016 that plant life is covering more and more of the planet as a result of carbon dioxide emissions was handled like radioactivity by most environmental reporters." Matt Ridley   "Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater's apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation's sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions." David Frum   "We talk a great deal nowadays about the Common Man; actually there has never been an age which offered more to the exceptional man and less to the average. No longer hampered by a rigid social structure, his intellect no longer limited by traditional or provincial horizons, the gifted and the strongwilled have greater opportunities for good and evil than ever before. And is it not precisely among such people, whether scientists, artists, or businessmen, people who find their work fascinating and rewarded, that humanism, or government of the ego by the ego for the ego, is most easily accepted as a creed, for when one has great gifts, what answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise them? Of what it must be like to be an average man whose work, particularly in an industrial society, can never content him or bring him fame, the gifted man has usually very little conception. Out of decency he may avoid the question of what such people, i.e. the majority of mankind, are to live by and for, by telling himself that a better organized society, a proper educational system, will make them as himself, but in his heart of hearts he knows that this is not so and that, humanistically speaking, there will always be an 'elite' to which he is lucky enough to belong, and the 'others,' for whose existence there must, presumably, be a reason though he cannot imagine what it is, unless he concludes that they exist for his benefit, objects of compassion, maybe, to be looked after, fed, protected, amused, but objects nevertheless." Wystan Hugh Auden   "In March 1982, the Stasi entered the home of seventy-nine-year-old Dresden art collector Helmuth Meissner. The agents carted off almost anything of value. The justification was that any citizen with more than a few works of art must be an unlicensed art dealer, thus a lawbreaker. Meissner had not paid dealer taxes, so the state was due 90 percent of whatever value an official placed on his collection. When Meissner protested the seizure, the Stasi had him committed to a psychiatric hospital." Don Thompson   "Deng Liqun was keenly aware of China's lack of economic progress, a frustration that could only have been deepened by his November 1978 trip to Japan. His astonishment at what he saw is palpable in his report of his trip. Deng reported that the Chinese interpreter who accompanied his delegation had grown up in Japan but had visited Tianjin in the early 1950s. At that time she had felt that Tianjin was more comfortable than Yokohama. Twenty-some years later the situation was 'vastly different.' Deng reported such facts as that one out of every two Japanese households owned automobiles and that over 95 percent of Japanese households had television sets, refrigerators, washing machines, and other amenities. He also noted the variety—and cleanliness—of clothes worn by the people, observing that: 'One Sunday we went out to a busy street. Of all the women we saw, no two wore the same style of clothes. The female workers accompanying us also changed clothes every day.'" Joseph Fewsmith   "If, like the English, they had been able, without destroying their old institutions, to gradually change their spirit by practice, perhaps they would not so easily have thought up completely new ones. But every Frenchman felt daily injured in his fortune, in his person, in his well-being, or in his pride by some old law, some ancient political practice, some remnant of the old powers, and he did not see any means available to remedy the particular problem himself. It seemed that one had to accept everything or destroy everything in the country's constitution." Alexis de Tocqueville   "The general assumption among the upper classes was that in all parts of the country the lower ranks of the population were 'clownish,' coarse in behavior, and lacking in self-​control. They did not set out to please in the way recommended by the manuals of civility, but were surly and uningratiating. They were unused to any 'ceremonies of courtesy,' and their gestures were graceless, 'hoggish,' and 'unrestrained.' Ignorant and inarticulate, they were incapable of polite discourse. If they met people of quality, they could be overcome by 'rustic bashfulness' and run away, 'ashamed or afraid.' Clumsy in body, they stood cap in hand, with rough arms hanging loose and toes turned in. The gentry were advised to keep their children away from 'barbarous nurses, clownish playing​­-mates, and all rustical persons,' lest they be contaminated by their bad manners." Keith Thomas   "The battles in the Baltic were more wild and ferocious than any I have experienced either in the world war or in the battles for liberation afterwards. There was no real front; the enemy was everywhere. And when contact was made, the result was butchery; to the point of utter annihilation. The Letts were especially good at this. It was there that I first encountered atrocities against civilians. The Letts exacted a terrible revenge on those of their own people who had hidden or cared for German or White Russian soldiers, as the case may be. They burned their houses and left the inhabitants to burn as well. Countless times I saw horrible images of burned-out cottages along with the charred or smeared corpses of women and children. When I saw this for the first time, I was turned to stone. Although later I had to face more horrible images repeatedly, I can today still see, perfectly clearly, the scorched cottage with an entire family dead inside, at forest's edge on the Dvina River." Rudolf Höss   "They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of the Jews, the persecution of Christians. They were not even bothered when their own party was prohibited, and their own members arrested. Socialist officials who abandon their party members and voters are a dismal enough sight; but what is one to say of aristocratic officers—like Herr von Papen—who stand by when their nearest friends and associates are shot, and who remain in office and shout 'Heil Hitler!'" Sebastian Haffner   "Strange to say, the word 'conscience,' which had gone out of ordinary use—it was not current in newspapers, books or in the schools, since its function had been taken over first by 'class feeling' and later by 'the good of the state'—was still doing service in prison, where people under interrogation were constantly warned of the 'pangs of conscience' they would suffer. Boris Sergeyevich Kuzin had told us that when they tried to recruit him as an informer he was threatened not only with arrest, difficulties in his work, the spreading of rumors among his friends and colleagues that he was already a police spy, but also with the 'pangs of conscience' he was bound to suffer for all the misery he would bring on his family if he refused to co-operate." Nadezhda Mandelstam   "I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force. I therefore gave red caps to some and glass beads to others. They hung the beads around their necks, along with some other things of slight value that I gave them. And they took great pleasure in this and became so friendly that it was a marvel. They traded and gave everything they had with good will, but it seems to me that they have very little and are poor in everything. I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange. This afternoon the people of San Salvador came swimming to our ships and in boats made from one log. They brought us parrots, balls of cotton thread, spears, and many other things, including a kind of dry leaf that they hold in great esteem. For these items we swapped them little glass beads and hawks' bells." Christopher Columbus   "Civilization even in its most servile forms has always offered much that is enormously attractive, convenient, and congenial to mankind; but something restless and untamed in our race has striven continually to convert civilization from its original reliance upon unparticipating obedience into a community of participating wills. And to the lurking nomadism in our blood, and particularly in the blood of monarchs and aristocracies, we must ascribe also that incessant urgency towards a wider range that forces every state to extend its boundaries if it can, and to spread its interests to the ends of the earth. The power of nomadic restlessness that tends to bring all the earth under one rule seems to be identical with the spirit that makes most of us chafe under direction and restraint, and seek to participate in whatever government we tolerate." Herbert George Wells   "Before 1755 England possessed almost no canals. In that year a canal was built in Lancashire from Sankey Brook to St Helen's; and in 1759, James Brindley built the first important one, the Duke of Bridgewater's Canal from Manchester and the coal-mines of the district to the mouth of the Mersey passing, near Barton, by aqueduct, over the river Irwell. From this achievement dates the canal building of England, to which Brindley first gave importance. Canals were now built, and rivers made navigable in all directions. In England alone, there are 2,200 miles of canals and 1,800 miles of navigable river. In Scotland, the Caledonian Canal was cut directly across the country, and in Ireland several canals were built. These improvements, too, like the railroads and roadways, are nearly all the work of private individuals and companies." Friedrich Engels   "When ten lights have been produced by a single electric machine it has been thought to be a great triumph of scientific skill. With the process I have just discovered I can produce 1,000—aye, 10,000—from one machine. Indeed, the number may be said to be infinite. When the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public—which will be in a few weeks, or just as soon as I can thoroughly protect the process—illumination by carburetted hydrogen gas will be discarded. With 15 or 20 of these dynamo-electric machines recently perfected by Mr Wallace I can light the entire lower part of New York City using a 500-horse power engine." Thomas Edison   "Rich families need housing and poor families need housing. People of all kinds need jobs in stores and offices. If space is scarce, then poor people won't be able to afford homes and low-margin businesses and start-ups won't stay in business. Indeed, scarcity is inherently anti-egalitarian. When there's not enough space to go around, it's the economically weakest who end up being outbid no matter what the distribution of income is." Matthew Yglesias   "We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists." Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov   "Must not every generous foreigner feel a secret indignation rise in his breast when he hears the language of Americans upon any of their own rights as freemen being in the least infringed, and reflects that these very people are holding thousands and tens of thousands of their innocent fellow men in the most debasing and abject slavery, deprived of every right of freemen, except light and air? How similar to an atrocious pirate, setting in all the solemn pomp of a judge, passing sentence of death on a petty thief." David Cooper   "The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are bought and sold, and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the 'poor white trash,' the great majority of the Southern people, know of the real condition of the country, is, indeed, sadly astonishing. The truth is, they know nothing of public measures, and little of private affairs, except what their imperious masters, the slave-drivers, condescend to tell, and that is but precious little, and even that little, always garbled and one-sided, is never told except in public harangues; for the haughty cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs will not degrade themselves by holding private converse with those who have neither dimes nor hereditary rights in human flesh." Hinton Rowan Helper   "Slavery made the slaveholders rich. But it made the South poor. And it didn't make the North rich. The wealth of the North was based on the emerging, capitalist internal market that allowed the North to win the Civil War. It's true that cotton dominated the export market. But it's only something like 5 percent of GDP. It's really the wealth of the internal northern market that's decisive. That depends on a fairly widespread distribution of wealth, and that doesn't exist in the South. There's a lot of evidence from western Virginia, for example, that non-slaveholders were angry at the slaveholders for blocking the railroads and things like that that would allow them to take advantage of the internal market. So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth." James Oakes