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"I once asked one of my sources at Amazon, who was concerned about the ways the search results were being manipulated, whether he'd ever seen a book deliberately boosted. Yes, he said. Becoming by Michelle Obama. When that book came out, he told me, virtually every search you did led to the recommendation to buy the former First Lady's book. And the opposite is also true. There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they've sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them." Abigail Shrier   "There is no clearly perceivable line which enables us in every case to clearly determine how far society may go in limiting and directing individual conduct. It changes with the changing conditions of life. But there is a guide which, when kept clearly and constantly in view, sufficiently informs us what we should aim to do by legislation and what should be left to other agencies. This is what I have so often insisted upon as the sole function both of law and legislation, namely, to secure to each individual the utmost liberty which he can enjoy consistently with the preservation of the like liberty to all others. Liberty, the first of blessings, the aspiration of every human soul, is the supreme object. Every abridgment of it demands an excuse, and the only good excuse is the necessity of preserving it." James Coolidge Carter   "It was in this crucial struggle between Bolshevik power and the peasantry that the policy of terror, based on an extremely pessimistic view of the masses, was really forged: 'They are so ignorant,' wrote Dzerzhinsky, 'that they have no idea what is really in their own interest.' The brute masses, it was felt, could be tamed only by force, by the 'iron broom' that Trotsky mentioned in a characteristic image when describing the repressions he had used 'to clean' Ukraine and 'sweep away' the 'bandit hordes' led by Nestor Makhno and other peasant chiefs." Nicolas Werth   "Suppose at the start of 2020, the government had said, 'In order to prevent mortality falling to the level of Scotland, we're going to undertake the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history. Thanks to our measures, it will only fall to the level of Wales instead.' I suspect that public support for lockdown would have been much lower." Noah Carl   "The degree to which a whole lot of progressive people don't seem to think human connection, socialization, and interaction is crucial for a healthy life seems surprisingly high! Seeing other people's faces, kids playing together, sharing meals—these are huge things to give up." Jill Filipovic   "In every election, I have had to choose either the grab bag of proposals offered by one party, 95 per cent of which are distasteful, or the grab bag offered by the other party, 97 per cent of which are distasteful. That is hardly a choice. At least when I buy a General Motors automobile, I do not have to buy GM gasoline, GM schools for my children, GM garbage collection service, GM old age annuities, or GM anything else. In a free market, I can separate my decisions on what automobile I buy from my choice of what gasoline I consume, which service station I patronize, which mechanic I go to for repairs, or which company insures my car or administers the funds I save for my retirement income." Yale Brozen   "What if banks—perhaps under social or regulatory pressure—backed up social media platforms' decisions to cancel or demonetize certain users by prohibiting payments services to those users, even through alternative platforms such as Substack or Rumble? Paypal, major credit card networks and banks have already stopped processing payments for organizations they deem 'hate groups,' yet activists demand they do more. It is naïve to expect these bans will not expand beyond the most egregious groups to many others." Todd Zywicki   "Honest differences of opinion and principled compromise often seem to be the victim of a determination to score points against one's opponents. But the American people sent us here to be their voice. They understand that those voices can at times become loud and argumentative, but they also hope that we can disagree without being disagreeable. And at the end of the day, they expect both parties to work together to get the people's business done. What they don't expect is for one party—be it Republican or Democrat—to change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet. The American people want less partisanship in this town, but everyone in this chamber knows that if the majority chooses to end the filibuster—if they choose to change the rules and put an end to democratic debate—then the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse." Barack Obama   "The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all." George Washington   "President Washington himself rode out in 1791 to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, and ever since, the usual pattern in American history—especially when riots are directed against local government—has more often than not been a backlash that puts down the rioters by force, as happened in the Draft Riots in New York in 1863. And contra Coates and Bouie, that has not been the pattern only when the rioters are black. Unrest among predominantly white college students, for example, was—just as much as urban African-American rioting in that era—a factor in the rise of Ronald Reagan to be California governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968. When riots and lynchings have been effective, as they were in establishing Jim Crow in the 1870s, it was usually because they had local government on their side, and a weary and distant federal government (which under President Grant had originally reacted with blunt force against the KKK) was no longer on hand to respond. But the Klan of the 1870s is a poor role model for anyone looking for any kind of positive social change." Dan McLaughlin   "Because we assess ourselves as 'equals in nature,' according to Hooker, we naturally exchange good for good, grief for grief, measure for measure. Both the Renaissance sciences of the body and the persistence of the principle of 'natural equality' in literary, theological, and political discourse meant that the Old Testament law of retaliatory justice, 'Thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe,' was not so easily displaced by a New Testament code of 'turning the other cheek. In the Renaissance, after all, both revenge and mercy—though posited as contrary ethical codes, one Old Testament, one New—were deemed instinctive responses to the relationship of one's self, one's own suffering, to others." Paula Blank   "The capacity to read could not be multiplied as fast as the means of reading. Spelling-books just began to go into the hands of the children; but the teachers were not very numerous or very competent; so that it is safe to infer they did not advance so speedily as they do now-a-days. It is very probable—almost certain—that the great mass of men, at that time, were utterly unconscious that their conditions or their minds were capable of improvement. They not only looked upon the educated few as superior beings; but they supposed themselves to be naturally incapable of rising to equality. To emancipate the mind from this false and under-estimate of itself is the great task which printing came into the world to perform." Abraham Lincoln   "In 2019, Richard Carranza, then the chancellor of New York City schools, held citywide 'white supremacy culture' training sessions for administrators, highlighting what was termed 'worship of the written word' or emphasis on 'documentation and writing skills, rather than the "ability to relate to others,"' as evidence of institutional racism. In July 2020, the Smithsonian Institution published (and rescinded) a graphic on its Talking About Race site that identified rational thought, politeness, objectivity, and the Protestant work ethic as harmful 'white' characteristics that perpetuate systemic racism." Thomas Chatterton Williams   "In his Histories, written in the middle of the fifth century BC, Herodotus took note of how bitterly the Scythians resisted cultural importations—to the point of killing other Scythians who showed too much attraction to foreign ideas. Herodotus also pondered the Egyptian determination to stick with their own traditions even in the face of improvements invented elsewhere. In his view, the Greeks held a great advantage in their willingness to consider, test, and judiciously adopt foreign concepts." Peter Wood   "As individuals, we find that our development depends upon the people whom we meet in the course of our lives. (These people include the authors whose books we read, and characters in works of fiction and history.) The benefit of these meetings is due as much to the differences as to the resemblances; to the conflict, as well as the sympathy, between persons. Fortunate the man who, at the right moment, meets the right friend; fortunate also the man who at the right moment, meets the right enemy." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "Before their execution or deportation to the labor camps, tens of thousands were interrogated and tortured into signing confessions to made-up crimes against the Soviet people and government, including giving names of imaginary accomplices to their anti-Soviet deeds. When Stalin was told that this method was bringing forth the desired results, he told the NKVD interrogators, 'Give them the works until they come crawling to you on their bellies with confessions in their teeth.' Then, in another purge after World War II, Stalin simplified the instructions even more: 'Beat, beat and, once again, beat.'" Richard Ebeling   "Asceticism was a common trait of the revolutionaries of Lenin's generation. They were all inspired by the self-denying revolutionary hero Rakhmetev in Chernyshevksy's novel What Is To Be Done? By suppressing his own sentiments, by denying himself the pleasures of life, Lenin tried to strengthen his resolve and to make himself, like Rakhmetev, insensitive to the suffering of others. This, he believed, was the 'hardness' required by every successful revolutionary: the ability to spill blood for political ends. 'The terrible thing in Lenin,' Struve once remarked, 'was that combination in one person of self-castigation, which is the essence of all real asceticism, with the castigation of other people as expressed in abstract social hatred and cold political cruelty.' Even as the leader of the Soviet state Lenin lived the spartan lifestyle of the revolutionary underground. Until March 1918 he and Krupskaya occupied a barely furnished room in the Smolny Institute, a former girls' boarding school, sleeping on two narrow camp-beds and washing themselves with cold water from a bowl. It was more like a prison cell than the suite of the dictator of the biggest country in the world. When the government moved to Moscow they lived with Lenin's sister in a modest three-room apartment within the Kremlin and took their meals in the cafeteria. Like Rakhmetev, Lenin did weight training to build up his muscles. It was all part of the macho culture (the black leather jackets, the militant rhetoric, the belief in action and the cult of violence) that was the essence of Bolshevism." Orlando Figes   "The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop." Clive Staples Lewis   "What we today view as a pleasing natural landscape—a grassy meadow surrounded by a forest and with a river running through it—is often a landscape created by humans to hunt game seeking out drinking water. Using fire to create a meadow in which to slaughter animals is one of the most frequent mentions of the uses of fire by hunter-gatherers around the world. The meadows of the North American eastern forests would have disappeared had they not been burned annually by Indians for five thousand years." Michael Shellenberger   "The argument for masking children, or obliging them to be vaccinated against a pathogen that is less likely to kill them than many others in normal circulation, should have stopped at the level of logic rather than continuing into a debate over its ethical and political implications. Neither masks nor vaccines can reliably prevent children from passing Sars-CoV-2 onto others, and I worry for the unvaccinated grandparent in a multi-generational household who believes themselves to be protected because their grandchild is attending school with an unpleasant (and environmentally unfriendly) piece of material on their face. I remain convinced that many people (including my cousins in India) have lost their lives labouring under this misapprehension." Sunetra Gupta   "I hope we're all saying we understand why that destruction happened and we understand why people are upset, but what I don't want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn't solve anything. It does make me wonder why looting bothers people so much more than knowing that, across the country, black men and women are dying every day, and far too often at the hands of those who are sworn to protect and serve." Tammy Morales   "I think that when you look historically at this nation, it's during these protests when we've gotten some of the changes that we are proudest of in our nation's history. And sometimes it took some property damage. It took more than just peaceful protests to get the government's attention. I'm very mindful of that." Mike Schmidt   "Defunding police means defunding police. It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education's budget so that the exact same police remain in schools." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez   "Every choice we face involves trading off one risk for another. Even something as simple as driving to work involves taking a risk—I may decide to walk and sacrifice time for the risk of driving, but my life may be the poorer for it." Jay Bhattacharya   "Our faith in the power of the state is a matter of desire rather than demonstration. When the state undertakes to achieve a goal and fails, we cannot bring ourselves to abandon the goal, nor do we seek alternative means of achieving it, for who is more powerful than a sovereign state? We demand, then, increased efforts of the state, tacitly assuming that where there is a will, there is a governmental way." George Stigler   "'You are dictatorial.' My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right." Mao Zedong   "The average 'very liberal' American believes that between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men are killed annually by police, when the actual number in 2020 was 17. However, beliefs like this are not based in reality. Only about 1,000 people of all races and sexes are killed by police in a typical year, and only around 250 of them are black. We may be overrepresented among those shot by police—14% of the population vs 25% of police shooting victims—but even this gap largely vanishes when one adjusts for black crime and police-encounter rates, which are about 2.5 times their white equivalents (no surprise, given that we are a younger and more urban population). And while violent interracial crimes involving blacks and whites are rare, accounting for only around three percent of serious crimes tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 80% of them are black-on-white." Wilfred Reilly   "Sometimes what happens to you isn't because you're black or because you're a woman. It's simply life. I mean, some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue. It's just life." Winsome Sears