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"Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay, even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. My very words to you now are an example of what I mean; for having already lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before." William James   "I didn't drink water the entire time. I lived on cigarettes and alcohol and Adderall. College was like a four-year gameshow called 'Do My Friends Hate Me Or Do I Just Need to Go To Sleep?' But instead of winning money, you lose $120,000. By the way, I agreed to give them $120,000 when I was 17 years old. With no attorney present." John Mulaney   "High murder and low suicide rates constitute a distinctly Southern pattern of violence, one that must rank with the caste system and ahead of mint juleps in importance as a key to the meaning of being Southern. Why this should be so is a question that has puzzled investigators for a long time, and their answers have been various. When one loyal Southerner was asked by a probing Yankee why the murder rate in the South was so high, he replied that he reckoned there were just more folks in the South that needed killing." Sheldon Hackney   "Not only Ruska but Ruska's whole generation had been trained to think of 'pity' as a degrading sentiment, of 'kindness' as comic, and of 'conscience' as priest's talk. On the other hand, it had been drilled into them that informing was at once a patriotic duty, the best way to help the subject of your denunciation, and good for the health of society. Ruska did not take all of this in, but it had a certain influence on him. The main question for him now was not whether becoming a stoolie was a bad thing or permissible but where it would get him." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn   "Basquiat was not ideally lucky in his choice of representatives. His social groom was Henry 'Freebie' Geldzahler, who had failed long ago as a writer, curator, and historian, but still wielded influence as a tipster, at least among new collectors. His first dealer, Annina Nosei, kept him in the basement of her gallery turning out canvases (now esteemed as 'early Basquiats,' to distinguish them from the less sought-after 'late Basquiats' of three years later), which she sold before they were dry and sometimes before they were finished. Her successor, for a time, was a disturbed Iranian sleazeball named Tony Shafrazi, who in the '70s had vandalized Picasso's Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art by spraying the words 'KILL LIES ALL' across it in red. (For some reason the trustees of MOMA chose not to prosecute Shafrazi; he soon re-emerged as a prosperous dealer in graffiti art, a dazzling act of chutzpah.) But Basquiat's unreliability, and his need for the drug money, prevented him from staying long with anyone—certainly not long enough to rig a safety net. When he died, about 35 dealers were said to have been holding a stake in him." Robert Hughes   "As far as I could see, he considered everyone to be capable of treachery for the sake of personal gain. A man was good only insofar as he was necessary to the cause. And if he wasn't necessary—to hell with him. Anyone harmful or even just inconvenient could be done away with—and this would be carried out calmly and sensibly, without malice. Even amicably. Lenin didn't even seem to look on himself as a human being—he was merely a servant of a political idea. Possessed maniacs of this kind are truly terrifying." Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya   "One should not always be counting and reckoning, but enjoying life." Stefan Zweig   "Everyone and everything needs to change, so why waste precious time arguing about who and what should change first. Everyone and everything needs to change, but the bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your responsibility." Greta Thunberg   "It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." David Graber   "Whatever the societal attitudes, it seems far more likely that they reflect rather than cause the sex differences in aggressive behavior. While they may contribute to ultimate differences through a kind of positive feedback, they are not the ultimate origin of those differences. After all, cultural expectations don't come from nowhere. If boys weren't naturally more inclined to engage in rough-and-tumble play, where would this expectation have come from? And why would it be so ubiquitous? If it's because adult men are more violent than women, then why is that? It can't be simply because our culture expects them to be, because then you're back to the same question of why that is. The simplest explanation is that we expect boys to engage in play fighting more than girls because we consistently observe that they do. And we expect men to be more violent than women because men actually are more violent than women." Kevin Mitchell   "The upper class cannot very well stand by as they begin to resemble the hoi polloi; they must adopt a new look. But then the look is emulated once again by the upper middle class and begins to trickle down again, prompting the upper class to leap to yet a different look, and so on. The result is fashion. The chaotic cycles of style, in which the chic look of one decade becomes dowdy or slutty, nerdy or foppish in the next, has been explained as a conspiracy of clothing makers, an expression of nationalism, a reflection of the economy, and much else. But Quentin Bell, in his classic analysis of fashion, On Human Finery, showed that only one explanation works: people follow the rule, 'Try to look like the people above you; if you're at the top, try to look different from the people below you.'" Steven Pinker   "We have learned to live with the flu, which can cause up to 80,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and between 300,000 and 650,000 worldwide. It doesn't invoke widespread fear, dread, and hysteria." Darren Schulte   "In the 30 years 1959-1988, 7,449,160 houses were built in England: in the 30 years 1989-2018, only 3,328,850." Paul Cheshire   "As most public men are, or have been, legal practitioners, they introduce the customs and technicalities of their profession into the affairs of the country. The jury extends this habitude to all classes. The language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that the whole people contracts the habits and the tastes of the magistrate. The lawyers of the United States form a party which is but little feared and scarcely perceived, which has no badge peculiar to itself, which adapts itself with great flexibility to the exigencies of the time, and accommodates itself to all the movements of the social body; but this party extends over the whole community, and it penetrates into all classes of society; it acts upon the country imperceptibly, but it finally fashions it to suit its purposes." Alexis de Tocqueville   "The average legislator, equally with the average citizen has no faith whatever in the beneficent working of social forces, notwithstanding the almost infinite illustrations of this beneficent working. He persists in thinking of a society as a manufacture and not as a growth: blind to the fact that the vast and complex organization by which its life is carried on, has resulted from the spontaneous co-operations of men pursuing their private ends. Though, when he asks how the surface of the earth has been cleared and made fertile, how towns have grown up, how manufactures of all kinds have arisen, how the arts have been developed, how knowledge has been accumulated, how literature has been produced, he is forced to recognize the fact that none of these are of governmental origin, but have many of them suffered from governmental obstruction; yet, ignoring all this, he assumes that if a good is to be achieved or an evil prevented, Parliament must be invoked. He has unlimited faith in the agency which has achieved multitudinous failures, and has no faith in the agency which has achieved multitudinous successes." Herbert Spencer   "The will, as the thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man; yet in itself it is without consciousness. For consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism's inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world." Arthur Schopenhauer   "Moral outrage played a useful role earlier in human evolution when people lived in small nomadic groups: It enabled greater accountability, co-operation and in-group trust. However, the amplification of moral outrage on a societal, or even global, scale carries dire implications for the pursuit of politics worth having. In the past, when we lived in environments of information scarcity, all the world's moral transgressions weren't competing for our attention." Randolph Nesse   "Why does social justice require censorship, deplatforming and social media dogpiles? How is it socially just to ascribe collective blame to a whole sex or race? What has happened to the idea that the way to beat bad ideas is with better ones?" Helen Pluckrose   "Europe's principal capital assets are, in the broad sense, intellectual: its legal instruments, financial institutions, educational traditions and information technology. Devices such as the limited liability company, purpose trusts, the banking system, the stock exchange, insurance, even national currencies, did not come into existence by fiat from some central power. They emerged gradually over centuries: the innovations of Venetian, Genoese and and Florentine merchants and bankers, the institution-building genius of Dutch seventeenth-century merchants, the clubbable instincts of the City of London financiers, the foresight of Hanseatic traders, not to speak of the Roman-law concept of corporate personality and the English-law doctrines of contract, equity and trust, all had a part to play in generating the diversified tools of finance and commerce in Europe. Each nation evolved a way of dealing with the complexities of international trade while protecting those who take the risk of it. And in each nation financial, educational and legal institutions became entwined, and connected to the networks and culture of our cities." Roger Scruton   "The Census shows that in 1881 there were upwards of 20,000 female farmers in England. At the present moment not one of these has the vote for Parliamentary purposes. But, then, the labourer whom she pays, whom she maintains, and enables to live in his cottage, has no vote now; but pass this Bill, and what happens? Every carter, every ploughman, every hedger and ditcher, every agricultural labourer who receives wages from the female farmer will have the privilege of exercising the vote; but the female farmer who pays the wages, who sustains the labourer, who is so important a factor in the social economy of the parish, will remain without a vote. Will you tell me that that anomaly will not be greatly increased, and the sense of it embittered to the female ratepayer whom you are going to treat in this cavalier manner?" John Manners   "The knowledge class had a profound distaste for the results of expanded suffrage. Woodrow Wilson, for example, complained about how difficult it was for progressives to influence 'the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes.' In these circumstances, the knowledge class—meaning not necessarily those who were particularly knowledgeable, but those who identified with academic knowledge—concluded that legislative power should be removed a step further away from the populace. In effect, they said, 'Yes, you get the right to vote equally. But the details of legislative power will be exercised by members of our class.'" Philip Hamburger   "China's efforts to contain the outbreak at the epicentre have been essential for preventing the further spread of the virus. China identified the pathogen in record time and shared it immediately, which led to the rapid development of diagnostic tools. They are completely committed to transparency both internally and externally and they have agreed to work with other countries who need their support." Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus   "Shakespeare's London was one of the great cities of Europe, though smaller than Madison, Wisconsin, is today. It was also rife with the religious bloodshed of modern Belfast or Baghdad. When Shakespeare arrived in London as a young man he would have passed, impaled on the famous bridge into town, the skull of a distant cousin, killed for being a Catholic. How could this fail to leave an impression?" Lorrie Moore   "If I observe the Friday with the Mahometan, or the Saturday with the Jew, or the Sunday with the Christian, whether I pray with or without a form, whether I worship God in the various and pompous ceremonies of the papists, or in the plainer way of the Calvinists, I see nothing in any of these, if they be done sincerely and out of conscience, that can of itself make me either the worse subject to my prince, or worse neighbour to my fellow subject. Unless it be, that I will out of pride, or overweeningness of my own opinion, and a secret conceit of my own infallibility, taking to myself something of a godlike power, force and compel others to be of my mind, or censure and malign them if they be not. This indeed often happens, but 'tis not the fault of the worship, but the men." John Locke   "At my own college, younger faculty members have complained publicly about the 'privilege' exhibited by colleagues who speak at length and 'with confidence' about controversial matters. The charge carries with it the wish, sometimes the suggestion, that those 'other' faculty members find a way to be ashamed of this privilege, which so many of their colleagues do not enjoy. Thus forthrightness and self-assurance can be made to seem as offensive and illegitimate as the Bentley parked ostentatiously in a well-tended driveway." Robert Boyers   "I believe very dark forces have taken over. I think the current party that is looking to take over this country is extremely dangerous. We will resist their danger at every stage because the Conservative Party have an aim to break up our country. They aim to destroy our NHS and we will say no. We will fight them in the Parliament. We will fight them in the courts. We will fight them in the work places and we will fight them in the streets. They will not destroy our country." Lloyd Russell-Moyle   "If we don't change, our species will not survive. I have been exposed to a tremendous amount of evidence in the past twenty years and I am even more convinced now that we must change. This will mean changing our fundamental ways of thinking and our ways of life; and that's not popular. Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse. We are still not so far down the road to disaster that we can't change, though." Maurice Strong   "Infant mortality in 1839 was 151 per 1,000 in England (comparable with that of Afghanistan in 2010); but in France it was 160, in Belgium 185, and in southern Germany 285." Robert Tombs   "Wealthy persons per se were born vipers. There was a great weeping and wailing over share-croppers and the like. All un-skilled labor was glorified in words, but bedded down as far as possible to form a foundation for this peasant class. The pleasures of peasantry were lauded to the skies. To make it appear inevitable, the nation was flooded with propaganda about there being no more frontiers; no more chances at all for free enterprise; not a prayer for a lone individual to rise by his own efforts. No more nothing but collectivism. It was like a rotting fog hovering over the land. It was as if from a vigorous youth, the United States had arrived overnight at a decaying old age. It was a case of don't try anything. If you could barely keep alive then you were spying noble. The trade unions were invaded and the line peddled that the members were really serfs. No more individuals at all. Their case was really pitiful. Nothing to do but hate bosses and work toward the day when they could do away with their hated oppressors. So labor disorders of an unheard-of intensity and violence swept the nation. It has taken years for many to come out of this fog and return to the American tradition." Zora Neale Hurston   "Roscoe Dunjee understood what it has taken me many years to understand. He understood that not only were the American people a revolutionary people, but that in the shedding of blood, the sacrifice, the agony, and anguish of establishing this nation, all Americans became bound to a covenant. Roscoe Dunjee understood, at a time when hardly anybody else did, that there was an irrational element in the American Constitution, a mysterious binding force which was the secret to moving people." Ralph Ellison