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"I have no intention of establishing a new Office of War Information to govern the flow of news. I am not suggesting any new forms of censorship or any new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma that I have posed, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to re-examine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all. Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: 'Is it news?' All I suggest is that you add the question: 'Is it in the interest of the national security?' And I hope that every group in America—unions and businessmen and public officials at every level—will ask the same question of their endeavors, and subject their actions to the same exacting tests." John Kennedy   "If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me. The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous. Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the leading-strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided. Now this danger is not in fact so very great, for they would certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls. But an example of this kind is intimidating, and usually frightens them off from further attempts." Immanuel Kant   "The Americans constitute a genuine danger for France. It is a very different danger from that which Germany represents and from that which Germany represents and from what the Russians might eventually pose for us. The Americans could prevent us from carrying out the obligatory revolution and their materialism does not even have the tragic grandeur of the materialism of the totalitarians. While they make a veritable cult of the idea of liberty, they do not for a minute feel any need to liberate themselves from a capitalism more dominant among them than anywhere else. It seems that overindulgence in well-being has diminished the vital force among them in a disquieting way." Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac   "The danger is not that we shall draw a veil over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its cost and human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name. The danger is that we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements. I am thinking in part of the determination, the dedication, the organization, the sheer hard work which in the last sixty years have transformed Russia into a major industrial country and one of the super-powers. Who before 1917 could have predicted or imagined this? But, far more than this, I am thinking of the transformation since 1917 in the lives of ordinary people: the transformation of Russia from a country more than eighty per cent of whose population consisted of illiterate or semi-literate peasants into a country with a population of more than sixty per cent urban, which is totally literate and is rapidly acquiring the elements of urban culture. Most of the members of this new society are the grand-children of peasants; some of them are great-grand-children of serfs. They cannot help being conscious of what the Revolution has done for them. And these things have been brought about by rejecting the main criteria of capitalist production—profits and the law of the market—and substituting a comprehensive economic plan aimed at promoting the common welfare." Edward Hallett Carr   "It is not property, which for Jane Austen always carried distinct responsibilities and patterns of behaviour with it—or should do. Unlike money, property supplied a specific agenda of duties, actions and rewards. The danger of money, on the other hand, was that not only did it not provide any pedigree: it conferred no specific obligations. Always 'circulating,' it was as uncertain in origin as it was indeterminate in application. It embodied no entelechy and was teleologically morally neutral—and indifferent. Anyone could be a 'do-anything' with it. Emma is unique among Jane Austen's heroines in that she is rich enough to think that she does not need a marriage with a proper man—with property—in order to exist properly in society. Marriage is a game she can play with other people. Her apparent freedom based on financial independence is thus not only deeply ambiguous but carries with it a latent double danger: she can delude herself and she can toy and tamper with other peoples' relationships. She of course does both." Tony Tanner   "Why would anybody want to go skiing? You could sit in the comfort of your own kitchen and break your knees with a hammer. What is the human impulse? What is wrong with these people? I think it's because they're so closeted, their lives are so comfortable, they actually seek out danger as a pastime. If you're poor, you don't go and look for danger because you're surrounded by it. Your accommodation is dangerous. Your neighbours are dangerous. Your own family are pretty handy. You probably have a couple of moves yourself." Dylan Moran   "The concept of 'truth' as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness—the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster." Bertrand Russell   "When people are bewildered they tend to become credulous. We are always in danger of expecting too much of the government. When there is distress such expectations are enlarged. The present condition of the country not only is not new, but not nearly so bad as it has been at other times. In 1818 when John Quincy Adams learned of the failure of many of the greatest commercial houses he recorded in his diary that the greatest danger would be the application of remedies worse than the disease." Calvin Coolidge   "With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself." Robert Jackson   "There is a real danger here of the splitting of society into self-segregating, non-communicating ghettoes. One of its axioms is that 'Only a member of my group can understand my pain.' This is the very opposite of Terence's dictum 'I think nothing human alien to me.' Over three hundred years the West has, with some success, developed an ethic of tolerance and respect for difference, and in a liberal society the prejudice and discrimination that undoubtedly still exist are to be fought wherever they occur. But that is precisely incompatible with an identity politics that builds walls around minorities, allowing no one else to enter, and at the same time insists on recognition from the wider society." Jonathan Sacks   "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   "Every second-year medical student knew that the elderly were almost certainly the most vulnerable group of people, since they were virtually always at highest risk of death and serious consequences from respiratory infections. Yet this was not stressed. To the contrary, the implication of reports and the public faces of official expertise implied that everyone was equally in danger. Even the initial evidence showed that elderly, frail people with preexisting comorbidities—conditions that weakened their natural immunological defenses—were the ones at highest risk of death. This was a feature shared by other respiratory viruses, including seasonal influenza. The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk. Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone." Scott Atlas   "It used to be commonplace for men to parade city streets with sandwich boards proclaiming 'The End of the World is at Hand!' They have been replaced by a throng of sober people, scientists, philosophers, and politicians, proclaiming that there are more subtle calamities just around the comer. The human race, they say, is in danger of strangling itself by overbreeding, of poisoning itself with pollution, of undermining its essential human character by tampering with heredity and of perverting the whole basis of society with too much prosperity." John Maddox   "The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline (taken in relation to the history of 'being') and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with Kulturpessimismus, and of course it has nothing to do with any sort of optimism either; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout the earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long since become absurd." Martin Heidegger   "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   "The suburban home must be destroyed. It stands for all that is dull and cowardly and depressing in modern life. It endeavours to eliminate the element of danger in human affairs. But without dangers there can be no joy, no ecstasy, no spiritual adventures. The suburban home is a blasphemy. It denies life. Young men it would save from wine, and young women from love. But love and wine are eternal verities. They are moral. The suburban home is deplorably immoral." Louis Esson   "How can I read and think slowly and carefully when there's no justice for the murderers of Breonna Taylor and countless others, and when the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg means that our judicial system will be even more an enemy of real justice in the future? How can I write coherent sentences when I think about the growing danger of an autocratic coup by the Trump administration? How do I tell myself that it's important to learn about and focus on the ancient Mediterranean when ash is falling from an orange sky and I need to keep my children inside for weeks on end? How does anyone have time for anything aside from self-care, activism, and treading water?" Donna Zuckerberg   "I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets—there were various affairs to settle—grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons. I admit my behaviour was inexcusable, but then my temperature was seldom normal in these days. My dear aunt's endeavours to 'nurse up my strength' seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing." Joseph Conrad   "We have, as it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of civilizations, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of a time-serving invention. He is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is—and how old-fashioned the words sound!—something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity—which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims." James Baldwin   "There is a danger that modern mass society starves the individual emotionally. Among the careful calculations of the bureaucratic state there is often no residue for commitment. But when all the normal avenues of commitment are closed, the need to belong may break forth in elementary ways. It is no accident that in the beginning the Nazi party was especially attractive to students, the very group which has felt increasingly unfulfilled by modern society. Fortunately, the Nuremberg party rallies belong to the past. Still we should read about them not as historic relics but as a warning of what may happen if society neglects the inner being or if man loses faith in his future." Henry Kissinger