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"The kind of being that can talk cannot possibly be just a mind or just a body. Neither can he be a mere loose combination of these, considered as two separate items. The mind is not in the body as a pilot is in a ship, but much more as the inside of a teapot is inside the outside. The fit need not be perfect—there are places where the contour diverges quite a lot. But they are still parts of a whole, and in general both can only be understood together, by grasping the nature of that whole. We are not compelled to say 'a man is really his body.' He is the whole, of which mind and body are equally just aspects, much more like temper or size or intelligence than they are like teeth or toes." Mary Midgley   "If you think about what science is for and scientific communication is about, science works only when you are able to discuss the evidence in the open. I might be wrong, maybe you disagree with me, I don't know. The point is that I've given you my evidence, and you can say, 'Jay, you're right here, you're wrong here.' Then maybe I'll change my mind or maybe you'll change your mind. We'll have a discussion and it will result in some sort of resolution where we're both better informed as the consequences of the discussion. The censorship of science, essentially, effectively, is that you may as well not do science at all. Because you've ended the conversation that actually produces the conclusions that you'd have some confidence in with science." Jay Bhattacharya   "It was the division of labour which probably gave occasion to the invention of the greater part of those machines by which labour is so much facilitated and abridged. When the whole force of the mind is directed to one particular object, as in consequence of the division of labour it must be, the mind is more likely to discover the easiest methods of attaining that object than when its attention is dissipated among a great variety of things." Adam Smith   "Stalin had neither friends nor 'brothers.' His was a world of political intrigue and psychological manipulation. He once revealed the workings of his mind to two of his communist comrades-in-arms during a conversation in 1923. 'To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed,' Stalin explained. 'There is nothing sweeter in the world.' He slept, it is said, with a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince by his bed. In his Marxist mind of class conflict and capitalist encirclements, threats and enemies were everywhere. No one was above suspicion or to be trusted. If we are to believe Khrushchev, Stalin, in fact, once remarked, 'I trust no one, not even myself.'" Richard Ebeling   "I say it roundly; if it were not for the punctiliousness of the middle-class in these matters all our civilization would go to pieces. They are the conservators and the maintainers of the standard, the moderators of Europe, the salt of society. For the kind of man who boasts that he does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up and who rather hates it, or else (and this is much more common) he is a rich man, or accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford to waste energy and stuff because he feels in a vague way that more clothes can always be bought, that at the end of his vagabondism he can get excellent dinners, and that London and Paris are full of luxurious baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting effects of wealth there is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy (and their parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious living." Hillaire Belloc   "Leisure—the word from which our word 'school' is derived—was for the Greek the expression of the highest moments of the mind. It was not labor; far less was it recreation. It was that employment of the mind in which by great thoughts, by art and poetry which lift us above ourselves, by the highest exertion of intelligence, as we should add, by religion, we obtain occasionally a sense of something that cannot be taken away from us, a real oneness and center in the universe; and which makes us feel that whatever happens to the present form of our little ephemeral personality, life is yet worth living because it has a real and sensible contact with something of eternal value." Irving Babbitt   "What counts is the surviving object and our living response to it. The tests are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, spur the mind to reflection and move the heart; further, is an apparent level of skill involved? Much current fashionable art bothers only the eye and briefly the brain, but fails to engage the mind and heart. It may, to use the old dichotomy, be beautiful, but it is rarely true to any significant depth. (On this subject, by the way, we should follow not Keats but Larkin: 'I have always believed that beauty is beauty, truth truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know.')" Julian Barnes   "Is it possible that what men consider enigmatic in women is actually agency? As in: If she does not want me, what the hell does she want? In room after room at the Louvre we will find painted women receptive to our gaze, applying for it, offering themselves up for judgement, whether it is the judgement of Paris or Cupid or Brian who just this minute got off the Eurostar. But the most famous portrait in the place, the exceptional portrait, is the one of the woman who doesn't appear to want our gaze or need it or even to know we're there. The woman who is in her own world, occupied with her own unknowable thoughts, though she is every hour surrounded by iPhone-wielding tourists. The woman who has ceased to be—or never was—concerned with whether or not you are looking at her. The woman with other things on her mind. Who has, precisely, mind!" Zadie Smith   "My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant. You say, 'These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.' You don't mind the times. You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather and were so much wet.' You don't care a sixpence whether he is wet or dry. You talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in society: but don't think foolishly." Samuel Johnson   "Only literature can give you this sensation of contact with another human mind, with the whole of this mind, its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its fixed ideas, its beliefs; with all that moves it, interests it, excites it or repels it." Michel Houellebecq   "Say you've come to cherish a certain dream, an idea, a theory, a conviction, or some external fact that struck you, or, at last, a woman who has enchanted you. You rush off in pursuit of the object of your love with all the intensity your soul can muster. It's true that no matter how blinded you may be, no matter how well your heart bribes you, still, if in the object of your love there is a lie, a delusion, something that you yourself have exaggerated and distorted because of your passion and your initial rush of feeling—solely so that you can make it your idol and bow down to it—then, of course, you're aware of it in the depths of your being; doubt weighs upon your mind and teases it, ranges through your soul and prevents you from living peaceably with your beloved dream. Now, don't you remember, won't you admit even to yourself what it was that suddenly set your mind at rest? Didn't you invent a new dream, a new lie, even a terribly crude one, perhaps, but one that you were quick to embrace lovingly only because it resolved your initial doubt?" Fyodor Dostoevsky   "Mrs Trollope, hounded by debt and bent on capitalizing on the success of her American book, took on Belgium. If Baudelaire had deigned to comment on her, he could only have approved of her way of thinking. After all, what could be more Belgian than America? Twin deceptions, brother monstrosities: young Belgium and young America. The same utilitarianism, the same sentimentality, the same democratic depravity, the same hatred for genius—and, of course, the same 'commercial smell.' Baudelaire's view lumped the two countries together in combined revulsion. Denouncing them both was an essential part of his final projects and goals. 'It is time to tell the truth about Belgium, and about America, the other Eldorado of the French rabble,' he wrote to Edouard Dentu in 1866, two years before his death. In his famous book on Belgium, which only exists as a series of drafts, America is right there on the first page of the outline: 'How we sang the glory and fortune of the United States of America, twenty years ago! Similar idiocy regarding Belgium.' Looking over the fragments of his Belgique deshahillee (or Pauvre Belgique) (Belgium Unclothed, or Poor Belgium), one often gets the sense that Baudelaire is settling two scores with one stroke of the pen. 'A general and absolute horror of the mind,' 'Spirit of obedience and conformity,' 'Associative spirit. By associating, individuals dispense with thinking individually,' 'Lack of commercial integrity (anecdotes),' 'Everyone is a salesman, even the rich,' 'Hatred for beauty, to offset the hatred for the mind,' 'Professional studies. Hatred for poetry. Education to produce engineers or bankers': Baudelaire was throwing stones at Belgium, but behind it was America." Philippe Roger   "In the battles over religious toleration that were so bitterly and widely waged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the idea of toleration was itself very largely inspired by religious values and was fundamentally religious in character. The proponents of toleration, whether Anabaptists, Sebastian Franck, and other sectarians, or Castellio, Socinians, Dutch Arminians, Roger Williams, Milton, and others of similar mind, might have been seen by their Catholic and orthodox Protestant adversaries as either dangerous heretics or doctrinally deviant, but there could be no question that they were nevertheless profoundly Christian in their thought and ideals. It is only stating the obvious to say that in advocating a policy of peace and tolerance toward religious differences, their supreme concern was the welfare of religion itself. They acted from the primary conviction that persecution was contrary to the mind of Christ and a terrible evil which did great harm to to Christianity." Perez Zagorin   "The war has not gone well, and increasingly in an almost primitive reaction to which modern societies are as much exposed as any Stone Age clan it has been judged that this is because the gods are against it. In modern parlance this means that the evil military industrial complex has embarked on a racist colonialist adventure. (I have heard the head of SNCC state that we were in Vietnam 'for the rice supplies.') But the essential point is that we have been losing a war, and this more than any single thing erodes the authority of a government, however stable, just, well-intentioned or whatever. I would imagine that the desire not to be the first President to 'lose' a war has been much in President Johnson's mind over the past years, and explains some of his conduct. But the fact is that he could not win, and the all-important accompanying fact is that the semi-violent domestic protest that arose in consequence forced him to resign. In a sense he was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls." Daniel Patrick Moynihan   "The love for slave property was swallowing up every other mercenary passion. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned labor. These things Mr Lincoln regarded as highly seductive to the thoughtless and giddy-headed young men who looked upon work as vulgar and ungentlemanly. Mr Lincoln was really excited and said with great earnestness that this spirit ought to be met and if possible checked; that slavery was a great and crying injustice, an enormous national crime, and that we could not expect to escape punishment for it. I asked him how he would proceed in his efforts to check the speed of slavery. He confessed that he did not see his way clearly. I think he made up his mind from that time that he would oppose slavery actively. I know that Mr Lincoln always contended that no man had any right, other than mere brute force gave him, to a slave. He used to say that it was singular that the courts would hold that a man never lost his right to his property that had been stolen from him but that he instantly lost his right to himself if he was stolen." Joseph Gillespie   "If we believe in the possibility of renaissance, of a rebirth of fine things and powerful ideas that have been lost to our own time, the voices of the dead will bring them vividly before the mind's eye. We may hear with sudden discomfort words like those Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!' We may start little by little to believe that some of our truths may be false, and some of our virtues may be vices." James Hankins   "It matters not that his first attempt to free innocence from the oppressor brings redoubled suffering upon the head of innocence. (I have in mind that scene in which Don Quixote saves an apprentice from a drubbing by his master, who, as soon as the deliverer is gone, punishes the poor boy with tenfold severity.) It matters not that, in his crusades against harmful giants, Don Quixote attacks useful windmills. The comical setting of these pictures should not distract our eyes from their hidden meaning. The man who sets out to sacrifice himself with careful forethought and consideration of all the consequences—balancing all the probabilities of his acts proving beneficial—is hardly capable of self-sacrifice." Ivan Turgenev   "The warlord who built up the greatest land army since Napoleon regretted having to spend money on weapons that could have been devoted to the arts. In 1937, as German rearmament was getting into high gear, he admonished his party comrades at the party rally to keep in mind that 'the armament of a nation is morally justified only when it serves as a shield and sword of a higher mission.' On another occasion around the same time, when warned of the immense cost of a gigantic stadium planned for Nuremberg, he responded defiantly, 'That is less than two battleships of the Bismarck class. How quickly a warship can be destroyed, and if not, it is scrap-iron anyhow in ten years. But this building will stand for centuries.'" Frederic Spotts   "He would have the pace of legislation quickened by the abolition of vain debates—he would have justice freed from the shackles of law—he would have public affairs conducted by officers of vast powers, unfettered by routine. He does not know his meaning. He does not see the consequences of his own teaching; and yet he is unconsciously tending to a result logically connected with the whole of it. Freedom, law, established rules, have their difficulties. They are possible only to men who will be patient, quiet, moderate, and tolerant of difference in opinion; and therefore their results are intolerable to a feminine, irritable, noisy mind, which is always clamouring and shrieking for protection and guidance. Mr Dickens's government looks pretty at a distance, but we can tell him how his ideal would look if it were realised. It would result in the purest despotism." James Fitzjames Stephen   "My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor and more than to the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century's civilization: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw." Gerard Manley Hopkins