+

"Two thirds of English boys took long apprenticeships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—impressive in the light of today's unfulfilled ambition to have half of young people in post-school education. Schooling and apprenticeship cost money, and required the prospect of high wages to make them affordable and attractive as investments, even to the poor: one Ealing gardener paid 6d a week to educate his two children—as much as he spent on beer. If there is a literacy threshold for economic development, England had probably passed it by 1700: there was practically universal literacy in high-level commercial occupations and close to universal in occupations where it was functionally valuable." Robert Tombs   "The WHO's review of the scientific literature concluded that there was 'no evidence' that universal masking 'is effective in reducing transmission.' The CDC's pre-2020 planning scenarios didn't recommend universal masking or extended school and business closures even during a pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu. Neither did the UK's 2011 plan, which urged 'those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives' and flatly declared, 'It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.'" John Tierney   "Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal humanity." Ernst Troeltsch   "It appears possible that the whole world may go mad, that all governments may break to pieces: that universal frenzy may take place under the name of universal fraternity, and that our children may find themselves in the place and manners of the eighth century." William Eden   "Suppose that two people out of a community of one thousand cannot be trusted to feed themselves or their children adequately that such irresponsibility is regarded as a social detriment. What is the most viable policy for a politician whose behaviour is constrained by vote maximization? If a universal degree of compulsion is to be established this could involve substantid policing costs including the costs of inspecting and checking not only the eating habits of the two delinquents but also that of the other 998. Compare this situation with one wherein say about 450 out of the 1,000 are likely to be delinquents. At first sight it may appear that the case for universal (as distinct from selective) compulsion is less substantial in the first situation with two 'delinquents' than in the second with 450. When political considerations enter however, the position appears more complex. Making nearly half of the electorate do something they have no wish to do is clearly a policy which stands to lose more votes than one which coerces only two people." Edwin West   "The dread and aversion with which I regard universal suffrage would be greatly diminished, if I could believe that the worst effect which it would produce would be to give us an elective first magistrate and a senate instead of a Queen and a House of Peers. My firm conviction is that, in our country, universal suffrage is incompatible, not with this or that form of government, but with all forms of government, and with everything for the sake of which forms of government exist; that it is incompatible with property, and that it is consequently incompatible with civilization." Thomas Babington Macaulay   "Kitsch has not been confined to the cities in which it was born, but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture. Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national cultural boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld. Today the native of China, no less than the South American Indian, the Hindu, no less than the Polynesian, have come to prefer to the products of their native art, magazine covers, rotogravure sections and calendar girls. How is this virulence of kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained? Naturally, machine-made kitsch can undersell the native handmade article, and the prestige of the West also helps; but why is kitsch a so much more profitable export article than Rembrandt? One, after all, can be reproduced as cheaply as the other." Clement Greenberg   "The bitter Babylonian disputes about portents, the bloody and passionate Albigensian and Anabaptist heresies, all seem erroneous to us today. At the time, man was completely involved in them, and by expressing them at the risk of his life he made truth exist through them, because truth never reveals itself directly but appears only through errors. In the dispute over universal, or over the Immaculate Conception or transubstantiation, the fate of human reason was at stake. And the fate of reason was also at stake during those big suits certain American states brought against the professors who taught evolution. In each time it is wholly at stake in relation to doctrines which the following time will reject as false. It is possible that evolutionary thinking will someday seem to be our century's greatest insanity; yet in bearing witness to its truth in opposition to the churches, the American professors lived the truth and lived it passionately and absolutely, at their own risk. Tomorrow they will be wrong; today they are absolutely right: the time is always wrong when it is dead, and always right while it is living. People may condemn it later all they want to, but it has already had its own passionate way of loving itself and tearing itself to pieces, against which future judgments are powerless. It has had its taste which it alone has tasted, and which is just as incomparable, just as irremediable, as the taste of wine in our mouth. A book has its absolute truth in its own time. It is lived through like a riot or a famine." Jean-Paul Sartre   "The most moving thing the theater can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of the free decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life. The situation is an appeal: it surrounds us, offering us solutions which it's up to us to choose. And in order for the decision to be deeply human, in order for it to bring the whole man into play, we have to stage limit situations, that is, situations which present alternatives one of which leads to death. Thus freedom is revealed in its highest degree, since it agrees to lose itself in order to be able to affirm itself. And since there is theater only if all the spectators are united, situations must be found which are so general that they are common to all. Immerse men in these universal and extreme situations which leave them only a couple of ways out, arrange things so that in choosing the way out they choose themselves, and you've won—the play is good." Jean-Paul Sartre   "Biologically speaking, humans were designed for co-operation, but only with some people. Our moral brains evolved for co-operation within groups, and perhaps only within the context of personal relationships. Our moral brains did not evolve for co-operation between groups (at least not all groups). How do we know this? Why couldn't morality have evolved to promote co-operation in a more general way? Because universal co-operation is inconsistent with the principles governing evolution by natural selection." Joshua Greene   "The Scottish theorists were very much aware of how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested upon man's more primitive and ferocious instincts being tamed and checked by institutions that he neither had designed nor could control. They were very far from holding such naive views, later unjustly laid at the door of their liberalism, as the 'natural goodness of man,' the existence of 'a natural harmony of interests,' or the beneficent effects of 'natural liberty' (even though they did sometimes use the last phrase). They knew that it required the artifices of institutions and traditions to reconcile the conflicts of interest. Their problem was 'that universal mover in human nature, self love, may receive such direction in this case (as in all others) as to promote the public interest by those efforts it shall make towards pursuing its own.' It was not 'natural liberty' in any literal sense, but the institutions evolved to secure 'life, liberty, and property,' which made these individual efforts beneficial." Friedrich Hayek   "The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community's needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal." Nicholas Wade   "In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." Karl Marx   "Wonder Woman is actually a dramatized symbol of her sex. She's true to life—true to the universal characteristics of women everywhere. Her magic lasso is merely a symbol of feminine charm, allure, oomph, attraction—every woman uses that power on people of both sexes whom she wants to influence or control in any way. Instead of tossing a rope, the average woman tosses words, glances, gestures, laughter, and vivacious behavior. If her aim is accurate, she snares the attention of her would-be victim, man or woman, and proceeds to bind him or her with her charm." William Moulton Marston   "If this were the place to go into details, I would observe to what extent this universal desire for reputation, honours and promotion which devours us all, activates and compares talents and strengths, how it excites and multiplies passions, and how, in making all men competitors, rivals or rather enemies, it causes every day failures, successes and catastrophes of every sort by making so many contenders run the same course; I would show that this burning desire to be talked about, this yearning for distinction, which almost always keeps us in a restless state, is responsible for what is best and worst among men, for our virtues and our vices, for our sciences and our mistakes, for our conquerors and our philosophers; responsible, in short, for a multitude of bad things and a very few good ones." Jean-Jacques Rousseau   "The principal ideas have come to us relatively unscathed, but some came in limping. The medieval period was exceptional for the clear identification and definition it gave to principles and concepts which were later to become mainstays of democratic governance, such as consent, representation, and the universal rule of law. Alcuin of York, brought to Europe by Charlemagne to found his school, had written as early as the ninth century that every government's authority 'derived solely from the common agreement of the subjects.' This idea was later given solid legal status by the canon law principle that 'whatever concerns and affects everyone must be approved by everyone.' The two semi-autonomous powers that defined medieval society, Church and Kingdom, 'could only exist peacefully,' Reilly notes, 'through shared recognition of the rule of law, its supremacy over each.'" Dennis Quentin McInerny   "It is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times." William Stanley Jevons   "The necessity of acquiring, not merely the real necessaries and comforts of life, but the means of living in style, a certain inveterate national habit of luxury, inexorable vanity in short, answer in England the same purpose as the conscription in France; and the fondest mother thinks as little of resisting the one as the other. This universal principle of activity constitutes the strength of England. Whether it secures private happiness is not so certain. Placed as England is, she must be great and glorious, or perish." Louis Simond   "Nature is often giving to the world some extraordinary men who arrive at fame by merit and universal consent, such as Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, etc. They were truly great or noble. But when government sets up a manufactory of nobles, it is as absurd as if she undertook to manufacture wise men. Her nobles are all counterfeits." Tom Paine   "The accelerating spread of information and ideas throughout the world, coupled with rising education standards and growing prosperity, is prompting demands for genuine political rights. Critics of globalisation maintain that a dynamic market and international capital are a threat to democracy, but what they really see threatened is the use that they would like to make of democracy. Never before in human history have democracy, universal suffrage, and the free formation of opinion been as widespread as they are today." Johan Norberg