+

"While telling nothing but stories taken from daily life, and showing that he knew it well and took pleasure in it, he drew conclusions that contradicted everything that was known about it, and ran counter to everything that had always been considered natural and human. Love your enemies, take joy in being unhappy, prefer being small to being big, poor to rich, sick to healthy. And whereas the Torah posits the elementary, evident, and verifiable truth that it's not good for men to be alone, Jesus said: Don't desire women, don't take a wife, if you have one, keep her so as not to harm her, but it would be better if you didn't have one. Don't have children either. Let them come to you, take inspiration from their innocence, but don't have any. Love children in general, not in particular, not like men have loved their children since time began: more than those of others, because they're their own. And even—no, above all—don't love yourselves. It is human to want one's own good: don't. Beware of everything that it is normal and natural to desire: family, wealth, respect, self-esteem. Prefer bereavement, distress, solitude, humiliation. Hold everything that is considered good for bad, and vice versa." Emmanuel Carrère   "Van Leenhof, holding that reason, and not hereditary principle or tradition, must be the exclusive basis of political legitimacy, maintains that 'everything is good insofar as it accords therewith and can rightly be considered divine, everything else being slavery under the appearance of government.' 'Knowledge of matters' he considers the only light by which we can proceed in debate about politics and the exclusive aid to adjusting our lives to the 'nature of God's order and guidance,' a typical Spinozist usage, later Morelly's l'ordre de la nature, denoting the fixed and rational structure of reality and Man's place in it. Conversely, ignorance and lack of knowledge is in politics, as in everything else, in van Leenhof's opinion, 'the root of all evil.' Reason and 'wisdom,' he adds, again employing the populist Spinozist phraseology he had coined, as well as being the key to assessing everything in politics is the path 'whereby we share in God's nature, the highest human good and happiness.'" Jonathan Israel   "Last spring I visited the Crystal Palace near London; in that Palace, as you're aware, there's a sort of exhibition of everything that has been devised by the ingenuity of man—an encyclopedia of humanity, one might call it. Well, I walked to and fro among the machines and implements and statues of great men; and all the while I thought, if it were decreed that some nation or other should disappear from the face of the earth, and with it everything that nation had invented, should disappear from the Crystal Palace, our dear mother, Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without disarranging a single nail in the place: everything might remain undisturbed where it is; for even the samovar, the woven bast shoes, the yoke-bridle, and the knout—these are our famous products—were not invented by us." Ivan Turgenev   "When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction." Philip Roth   "A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties." Milan Kundera   "Some day this country is going to get it—really get it. We had everything to start with—everything—but there's bound to be a retribution. We've followed the same selfish, greedy path as every other country in the world. We talk about the American Dream and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States, for this reason, is the greatest failure the world has ever seen." Eugene O'Neill   "Mankind see distant things in a false point of light, and judge either more or less favorably than they ought—this is an old observation; another as old, perhaps, but which all are not in the position to feel, is, that we try everything by the standard of preconceived notions, so that there is an impossibility almost of knowing by description a distant people or country. Whoever, therefore, desires to apply in the practical science of government those rules and forms which prevail and succeed in a foreign country, must fall into the same pedantry with our young scholars just fresh from an university, who would fain bring everything to a Roman standard. Different constitutions of government are necessary to the different societies on the face of this planet. Their difference of position is in itself a powerful cause—their manners, their habits. The scientific tailor, who should cut after Grecian or Chinese models, would not have many customers either in London or Paris; and those who look to America for their political forms are not unlike the tailors in the Island of Laputa, who, as Gulliver tells us, always take measure with a quadrant. He tells us, indeed, what one would naturally expect from such a process, that the people are seldom fitted." Gouverneur Morris   "At this time I came to a conclusion which, although it may appear obvious, was important to the development of my thinking about politics. This was simply that nearly all human beings have an extremely intermittent grasp on reality. Only a few things, which illustrate their own interests and ideas, are real to them; other things, which are in fact equally real, appear to them as abstractions. Thus, when men have decided to pursue a course of action, everything which serves to support this seems vivid and real; everything which stands against it becomes abstraction. Your friends are allies and therefore real human beings with flesh and blood and sympathies like yourself. Your opponents are just tiresome, unreasonable, unnecessary theses, whose lives are so many false statements which you would like to strike out with a lead bullet as you would put the stroke of a lead pencil through a bungled paragraph." Stephen Spender   "The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated." José Ortega Y Gasset   "On the one hand, to function well, you have to believe in yourself and your abilities and summon enormous confidence from somewhere. On the other hand, to write well, or just to be a good person, you need to be able to doubt yourself—to entertain the possibility that you're wrong about everything, that you don't know everything, and to have sympathy with people whose lives and beliefs and perspectives are very different from yours." Jonathan Franzen   "The revolution of Peter the Great replaced the obsolete squirearchy of Russia with a European bureaucracy; everything that could be copied from the Swedish and German codes, everything that could be taken over from the free municipalities of Holland into our half-communal, half-absolutist country, was taken over; but the unwritten, the moral check on power, the instinctive recognition of the rights of man, of the rights of thought, of truth, could not be and were not imported." Aleksandr Herzen   "Economists are often accused of believing that everything—health, happiness, life itself—can be measured in money. What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that everything can be measured in anything." David Friedman   "Man, motivated by self-interest, undertakes that which may be to his immediate or later advantage, and avoids that from which he expects no present or future gain. Following this natural instinct, everything we do for our own sake, everything we do without compulsion, we do carefully, industriously, and well. On the other hand, all that we do not do freely, all that we do not do for our own advantage, we do carelessly, lazily, and all awry." Alexander Radishchev   "The aim of identity politics would appear to be to politicize absolutely everything. To turn every aspect of human interaction into a matter of politics. To interpret every action and relationship in our lives along lines which are alleged to have been carved out by political actions. The calls to spend our time working out our own place and the places of others in the oppression hierarchy are invitations not just to an era of navel-gazing, but to turn every human relationship into a political power calibration. The new metaphysics includes a call to find meaning in this game: to struggle, and fight and campaign and 'ally' ourselves with people in order to reach the promised land. In an era without purpose, and in a universe without clear meaning, this call to politicize everything and then fight for it has an undoubted attraction." Douglas Murray   "Only rarely do teachers propose that writing might be worth reading closely. Instead, students are informed that literature is principally a vehicle for the soporific moral blather they suffer daily from their parents. The present vogue for teaching 'values' through literature uses the novel as a springboard for the sort of discussion formerly conducted in a civics or ethics class—areas of study that, in theory, have been phased out of the curriculum but that, in fact, have been retained and cleverly subsituted for what we used to call English—and everything about it that is inventive, imaginative, or pleasurable—is beside the point in classrooms, as is everything that constitutes style and that distinguishes writers, one from another, as precisely as fingerprints or DNA mapping." Francine Prose   "Chomsky called the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon 'authoritarian and repressive,' but said nothing about the North Vietnamese government's massacre of three thousand civilians two years earlier in Hue, an event he already knew about. This champion of free speech who claimed that corporate 'lapdogs' like the New York Times lacked the courage to print the truth nonetheless accepted everything said to him by the director of the largest state-owned newspaper in North Vietnam (the equivalent of Pravda). He spent time with Premier Pham Van Dong and other high-ranking officials, again accepting everything they said, including their patently false assurances that 'South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will be neutral after the reunification of the country.' He mentioned not one word about the status of dissidents, the lack of a free press, the fate of political prisoners, or the policy of official repression. This champion of individual freedom and dissent, this American Sakharov, went to a totalitarian country and found no dissent. Instead, he lavished praise on a brutal collectivist dictatorship." Peter Schweizer   "When a girl has given away everything, she is weak, she has lost everything, for in a man innocence is a negative element, but in a woman it is a substance of her being. Now all resistance is impossible, and to love is beautiful only as long as resistance is present; as soon as it ceases, to love is weakness and habit." Soren Kierkegaard   "You leave everything that was familiar behind and find yourself in completely new, incomprehensible surroundings. You have to learn everything from scratch, decipher all the puzzling cultural codes, and perform the most daunting task of all—finding a place for yourself in this new and strange country. Now, there is an additional pressure to do all this in a very short time. Nobody expected immigrants to assimilate right away a hundred years ago. They would live in their immigrant enclaves their whole lives and consider themselves lucky if their children got to break away. Today, globalization makes assimilation seem deceptively easy, and people who fail to assimilate quickly enough are often viewed negatively. But trying to rush this process too much leads to terrible rookie mistakes." Lara Vapnyar   "That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch." Geoff Dyer   "Biology may not be everything, but it is the substantial majority of everything." Gregory Clark