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"Unappreciated cranks submitted their programmes for the betterment of humanity, believing that at last their much-scorned ideas would have a chance to turn earth into Paradise. They all had their own infallible and omnipotent cures; and, granted their premises, their logic was unimpeachable. Some believed that the root of all evil was cooked food, others the gold standard, others unhygienic underwear, or machinery, or the lack of a compulsory universal language, or multiple stores, or birth control. They reminded me of the Swabian shoemaker who wrote a voluminous pamphlet to prove that man owed his moral sickness to the fact that he satisfied his elementary needs in closed rooms and with the aid of artificial paper; whereas if he spent these daily moments out in the woods and availed himself of the natural moss all spiritual poisons would also evaporate into the surrounding air, and he would be at the same time bodily and spiritually purified, returning to his work with a strengthened social conscience and a diminished egoism; true love of humanity would be awakened and the Kingdom of God on Earth would be at hand." Ernst Toller   "Sartre's Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokov's protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger, Meursault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn. These fictional endings all represent where humanity is ending up in reality, a humanity that, if it does not care to be crushed under the machine, must go about in a rhinoceros's skin." Jalal Al-e-Ahmad   "In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming 'This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!' we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before." Richard Feynman   "There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself." Leo Tolstoy   "It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Nietzsche lamented what Christians had done to classical civilization. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. 'In the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty,' he wrote, 'before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.'" Tom Holland   "What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's? You cannot treat people like cattle. You must respect the diversity of cultures on earth. Lomborg thinks of people like numbers. He thinks it would be cheaper just to evacuate people from the Maldives, rather than trying to prevent world sea levels from rising so that island groups like the Maldives or Tuvalu just disappear into the sea. But where's the respect for people in that? People have a right to live and die in the place where their forefathers have lived and died. If you were to accept Lomborg's way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing." Raj Pachauri   "The greatness of war is just what at first sight seems to be its horror—that for the sake of their country, men will overcome the natural feelings of humanity, that they will slaughter their fellow men who have done them no injury, whom they perhaps respect as chivalrous foes. Man will not only sacrifice his life, but the natural and justified instincts of his soul; his very self he must offer up for the sake of patriotism; here we have the sublimity of war. When we pursue this thought further, we see how war, with all its brutality and sternness, weaves a bond of love between man and man, linking them together to face death, and causing all class distinctions to disappear. He who knows history knows also that to banish war from the world would be to mutilate human nature." Heinrich von Treitschke   "I say it once again: everything that is truly elevated cannot and must not be judged by its utility; having to be useful is completely alien to art's divine nature and to insist that it be so is to strip what should be sublime of its nobility and to debase it to the level of the basic needs of humanity. Of course man needs lots of different things, but his spirit must not be degraded to become the servant of his body—the servant of his servant in other words. Like any good head of a household, he must attend to material needs, but must not allow this concern to be his be-all and end-all. Art is the guarantee of our immortality." Ludwig Tieck   "The world can sigh in relief. The idol of communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity, and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed. It has collapsed, never to rise again." Boris Yeltsin   "Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts; and fine art is frequently the key—with many nations there is no other—to the understanding of their wisdom and of their religion." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel   "The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the humanity which remedies them." Thomas Babington Macaulay   "If he is in English or drama, he may be able to write novels or plays emphasizing near-future worlds in which famines or plagues are changing the very nature of mankind and his societies. If he is in business school, he can 'hit the road' lecturing to business groups and industrial conferences on 'The Stork as an Enemy of Capitalism.' If he is in the physical sciences, he can write strong letters to his narrow-minded colleagues who are proposing idiotic panaceas to solve the food problem. Any scientist can be urged to write to the Scientific American and similar journals to ask the editors to stop accepting advertisements that imply that a technology for mining or farming the sea can save humanity. The high standards that these journals maintain in their articles should also apply to their advertising. Scientists who serve on government committees can be pressed to exploit their position to awaken our sleeping government. Any professor, lecturing anywhere, can insert into his lecture a 'commercial' on the problem. 'And so I come to the end of my discussion of the literary significance of Darwin's hangnail. In conclusion, I would like to remind you that our Society for the Study of Darwin's Hangnail can only exist in a world in which there is leisure time for intellectual pursuits, and a social system which permits such pursuits. Unless something is done now to bring the runaway human population under control, the SSDH will not long endure.'" Paul Ehrlich   "The power of the Passion for Christians in the Middle Ages—and today—is the realization that the abjected body of Christ, spat on, beaten, bleeding, crucified, is the image of humanity's sinfulness projected from the inner realm of one's spiritual being outward and onto the guiltless sacrificial victim. Christ as a sacrificial lamb is not a freestanding entity, however, for someone had to offer him—not Jews, but his own Father. Explaining why people think of God as 'the God of unequaled violence,' Girard explains that 'he not only requires the blood of the victim who is closest to him, most precious and dear to him, but he also envisages taking revenge upon the whole of mankind for a death that he both required and anticipated.' The death of Christ as a sacrificial lamb is not easily separated from the idea of vengeance against those who put him to death. Medieval knights understood both sides of this model. They saw themselves first as avengers of Christ's foes, and second as Christians who suffered and died for the faith. Even so, they could not see themselves as sacrificial victims, although the example of holy men who were martyrs—thus sacrificial victims—was always before them." Allen Frantzen   "Three weeks of the London Season are more than enough for anyone who works through the pleasures of the town with ordinary zeal and perseverance. When you have eaten half-a-dozen dinners at friends' houses, you will find that you have to decline a full dozen more. When you have fought your way through the barricades of humanity to the hostess at one grand dance, you will find you have no life left in you to struggle that way any more. When you have done one July reception, you will wish yourself on the moors. When you have done two, you will wish yourself at the bottom of the sea." Charles Eyre Pascoe   "The circumstances which have most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity—these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at ten thousand firesides." Thomas Babington Macaulay   "All values ultimately come from our (the poets) judicial sentences. (This arrogance is not mine but Shelley's and it is absolutely true. Humanity is malleable mud, and the arts set the moulds it is later cast into.)" Ezra Pound   "If Kostov admitted his guilt, he was guilty. If he denied it (as he attempted to do), this was proof that the trial was not rigged and that he was therefore guilty. Similarly, food rationing in France was a restriction, in Poland it was popular. If communism ruled, then the people ruled. If the people ruled, they must perforce be happy—thus Paul Eluard, upon his return from a voyage to Hungary in 1949: 'If the people are master in their own country this alone will ensure that in a few years happiness will be the supreme law, and joy the daily horizon.' Non-Communists could not usually aspire to the lyricism of an Eluard or the sheer cheek of a Desanti, but they argued outward from similar starting points. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre avoided the implications of the revelations about Soviet labor camps by turning the evidence against itself: the very fact that Communists have illusions about these camps is proof that they wish to believe well of humanity; they are therefore fundamentally different from Fascists (who also had camps), and we can continue to support them, albeit from afar." Tony Judt   "Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism—it is well to recall this today—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth." José Ortega Y Gasset   "What purpose does this book serve? How can it be applied for the moralization and well-being of the poorest and most numerous class? What! Not a word of the needs of society, nothing about civilization and progress? How can a man, instead of making the great synthesis of humanity, and pursuing the regenerating and providential idea through the events of history, how can he write novels and poems which lead to nothing, and do not advance our generation on the path of the future? How can he busy himself with form, and style, and rhyme in the presence of such grave interests? What are style, and rhyme, and form to us?" Theophile Gautier   "At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn't come out of that creature isn't worth having, or it's worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line—unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that's the moment it wants. That's where it comes alive—even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt." Ted Hughes