Non-fiction authors from the United Kingdom

"Were a man to live as long as Methuselah, and to spend all his days in the highest delights sin can offer, one hour of the anguish and tribulation that must follow, would far outweigh them."

"Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out; and when it does come, it is out again immediately."

"The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved."

"Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in fine gay colours that are but skin-deep."

"The better day, the worse deed."

"So great was the extremity of his pain and anguish that he did not only sigh but roar."

"To their own second thoughts."

"He rolls it under his tongue as a sweet morsel."

"Our creature comforts"

"None is so deaf as those that will not hear."

"They that die by famine die by inches."

"To fish in troubled waters."

"Here is bread, which strengthens man's heart, and therefore called the staff of life."

"Hearkners, we say, seldom hear good of themselves."

"Those who will not be counselled, cannot be helped. More souls are ruined by pride than by any other sin whatever."

"It was a common saying among the Puritans, "Brown bread and the Gospel is good fare.""

"Blushing is the colour of virtue."

"It is common for those that are farthest from God, to boast themselves most of their being near to the Church."

"None so blind as those that will not see."

"Those may justly be reckoned void of understanding that do not bless and praise God; nor do men ever rightly use their reason till they begin to be religious, nor live as men till they live to the glory of God. As reason is the substratum or subject of religion (so that creatures which have no reason are not capable of religion), so religion is the crown and glory of reason, and we have our reason in vain, and shall one day wish we had never had it, if we do not glorify God with it."

"Not lost, but gone before."

"Those that are above business."

"Better late than never."

"Saying and doing are two things."

"Judas had given them the slip."

"Whatever we have, the property of it is God's; we have only the use of it, according to the direction of our great Lord, and for his honour."

"After a storm comes a calm."

"Men of polite learning and a liberal education."

"It is good news, worthy of all acceptation; and yet not too good to be true."

"It is not fit the public trusts should be lodged in the hands of any, till they are first proved and found fit for the business they are to be entrusted with."

"Do nothing till thou hast well considered the end of it."

"Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces."

"The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve the purity of it."

"An active faith can give thanks for a promise even though it be not yet performed, knowing that God's bonds are as good as ready money."

"The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning."

"In all God's providences, it is good to compare His word and His works together; for we shall find a beautiful harmony between them, and that they mutually illustrate each other."

"I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed."

"A computation is a physical process in which physical objects like computers, or slide rules or brains are used to discover, or to demonstrate or to harness properties of abstract objects—like numbers and equations. How can they do that? The answer is that we use them only in situations where to the best of our understanding the laws of physics will cause physical variables like electric currents in computers (representing bits) faithfully to mimic the abstract entities that we’re interested in."

"Surely it is more interesting to argue about what the truth is, than about what some particular thinker, however great, did or did not think."

"Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense..."

"The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy—but the ones that contain the deepest explanations."

"The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests."

"A prediction, or any assertion, that cannot be defended might still be true, but an explanation that cannot be defended is not an explanation."

"To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. … Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world."

"The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation—the only one that is tenable—of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality."

"Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical."

"Thus we can see that if we take solipsism seriously - if we assume that it is true and that all valid explanations must scrupulously conform to it - it self destructs. How exactly does solipsism, taken seriously, differ from its common-sense rival, realism? The difference is based on no more than a renaming scheme. Solipsism insists on referring to objectively different things (such as external reality and my unconscious mind, or introspection and scientific observation) by the same names. But then it has to introduce the distinction through explanations in terms of something like the 'outer part of myself'. But no such extra explanation would be necessary without its insistence on an inexplicable renaming scheme. Solipsism must also postulate the existence of an additional class of processes - invisible, inexplicable processes which give the mind the illusion of living in an external reality. The solipsist, who believes that nothing exists other than the contents of one mind, must also believe that that mind is a phenomenon of greater multiplicity than is normal supposed. It contains other-people-like thoughts, planet-like thoughts and laws-of-physics-like thoughts. These thoughts are real. They develop in a complex way (or pretend to), and they have enough autonomy to surprise, disappoint, enlighten or thwart other classes of thoughts which call themselves 'I'. Thus the solipsist's explanation of the world is in terms of interacting thoughts rather than interacting objects. But those thoughts are real, and interact according to the same rules that the realist says govern the interaction of objects. Thus solipsism, far from being a world view striped to its essentials, is actually just realism disguised and weighed down by additional baggage, introduced only to be explained away."

"Think of all our knowledge-generating processes, our whole culture and civilization, and all the thought processes in the minds of every individual, and indeed the entire evolving biosphere as well, as being a gigantic computation. The whole thing is executing a self-motivated, self-generating computer program. More specifically it is, as I have mentioned, a virtual-reality program in the process of rendering, with ever-increasing accuracy, the whole of existence."

"It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment."

"Since building a universal virtual-reality generator is physically possible, it must actually be built in some universes."

"Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature … It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes, and then sharing the results."

"The next chapter is likely to provoke many mathematicians. This can't be helped. Mathematics is not what they think it is."

"Mathematical knowledge may, just like our scientific knowledge, be deep and broad, it may be subtle and wonderfully explanatory, it may be uncontroversially accepted; but it cannot be certain."

"Necessary truth is merely the subject-matter of mathematics, not the reward we get for doing mathematics. The object of mathematics is not, and cannot be, mathematical certainty. It is not even mathematical truth, certain or otherwise. It is, and must be, mathematical explanation."

"Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book."

"Kuhn's theory suffers from a fatal flaw. It explains the succession from one paradigm to another in sociological or psychological terms, rather than as having primarily to do with the objective merit of the rival explanations. Yet unless one understands science as a quest for explanations, the fact that it does find successive explanations, each objectively better than the last, is inexplicable."

"Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is."

"The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge."

"That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment. It motivates all traditions of criticism, as well as the principle of seeking good explanations. But it can be interpreted in two almost opposite ways, both of which, confusingly, are known as ‘perfectibility’. One is that humans, or human societies, are capable of attaining a state of supposed perfection – such as the Buddhist or Hindu ‘nirvana’, or various political utopias. The other is that every attainable state can be indefinitely improved. Fallibilism rules out that first position in favour of the second."

"Any theory about improvement raises the question: how is the knowledge of how to make that improvement created? Was it already present at the outset? The theory that it was is creationism. Did it ‘just happen’? The theory that it did is spontaneous generation."

"If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how."

"Let me define that [wealth] in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing."

"Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative? That all other moral truths follow from it?"

"As I understand it, the claim is that the less you use Homeopathy, the better it works. Sounds plausible to me."

"The rational thing for a layperson to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory."

"Native slipstream thinking, which has been around for millennia, anticipated recent cutting-edge physics, ironically suggesting that Natives have had things right all along. The closest approximation in quantum mechanics is the concept of the "multiverse," which posits that reality consists of a number of simultaneously existing alternate worlds and/or parallel worlds. Interested readers will enjoy John Gribbin's In Search of the Multiverse: Parallel Worlds, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Frontiers of Reality (2010) and David Deutsch's seminal The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications (1998). Deutsch's approach describes reality as "an infinite library full of copies of books that all start out the same way on page one, but in which the story in each book deviates more and more from the versions in the other books the farther into the book you read." The further twist of Deutsch's theory is that it "allows universes to merge back together... as if two of the books in the library have the same happy ending arrived at by different routes.""

"We must not pursue science for ends independent of science. It must be pursued for its own sake, and must lead to its own results."

"The English constitution was excellent until removed by foreign writers into the domain of theory, when in direct contradiction with its nature and origin it came to be admired as a common representative government."

"There is a wide divergence, an irreconcilable disagreement, between the political notions of the modern world and that which is essentially the system of the Catholic Church. It manifests itself particularly in their contradictory views of liberty, and of the functions of the civil power. The Catholic notion, defining liberty not as the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought, denies that general interests can supersede individual rights. It condemns, therefore, the theory of the ancient as well as of the modern state. It is founded on the divine origin and nature of authority. According to the prevailing doctrine, which derives power from the people, and deposits it ultimately in their hands, the state is omnipotent over the individual, whose only remnant of freedom is then the participation in the exercise of supreme power; while the general will is binding on him.† Christian liberty is lost where this system prevails: whether in the form of the utmost diffusion of power, as in America, or of the utmost concentration of power, as in France; whether, that is to say, it is exercised by the majority, or by the delegate of the majority,—it is always a delusive freedom, founded on a servitude more or less disguised. In one form and under one pretext or another, the state has been absolute on the Continent of Europe for the last 300 years. In the sixteenth century absolutism was founded on religious zeal, and was expressed in the formula cujus regio, illius religio. In the seventeenth century it assumed the garb of legitimacy and divine right, and the king was believed when he said, "L'état c'est moi." In the eighteenth century arbitrary government found a new and stronger basis in the theory of the public good, of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and justified every act of tyranny by the maxim, the king is the first servant of the state. All these principles of despotism are incompatible with the Catholic ideas, and with the system by which the Pope, on pain of being in contradiction with himself, and with the spirit and practice of the Church, is compelled to govern. They are condemned by the traditions, and by the moral obligations, of the Court of Rome, whose system is one of charity and of liberty, and which knows no public consideration which is superior to the salvation of souls."

"There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion."

"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."

"The nation had no instinct and no productive power that emancipated it from the customs of its forefathers. Every appeal against oppression was to the hereditary rights; the only protection which the Englishman knew was in the traditional laws of his country. By means of this perpetual recurrence to old principles, and of the gradual contrivance of new forms in which to secure their action, the English people conquered their freedom. The intensity of their conservatism was an impulse as well as a guide of their progress."

"Without presuming to decide the purely legal question, on which it seems evident to me from Madison's and Hamilton's papers that the Fathers of the Constitution were not agreed, I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."

"Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion, and it stands to the domestic feelings and to home-sickness as faith to fanaticism and to superstition."

"The man who prefers his country before every other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the State. They both deny that right is superior to authority."

"A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government. The theory of nationality, therefore, is a retrograde step in history."

"Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition."

"Although, therefore, the theory of nationality is more absurd and more criminal than the theory of socialism, it has an important mission in the world, and marks the final conflict, and therefore the end, of two forces which are the worst enemies of civil freedom, — the absolute monarchy and the revolution."

"The Protestants never occupied a more triumphant position, and their prospects were never brighter, than in the summer of 1572. For many years the progress of their religion had been incessant. The most valuable of the conquests it has retained were already made; and the period of its reverses had not begun. The great division which aided Catholicism afterwards to recover so much lost ground was not openly confessed; and the effectual unity of the Reformed Churches was not yet dissolved. In controversial theology the defence was weaker than the attack. The works to which the Reformation owed its popularity and system were in the hands of thousands, while the best authors of the Catholic restoration had not begun to write. The press continued to serve the new opinions better than the old; and in literature Protestantism was supreme. Persecuted in the South, and established by violence in the North, it had overcome the resistance of princes in Central Europe, and had won toleration without ceasing to be intolerant. In[Pg 103] France and Poland, in the dominions of the Emperor and under the German prelates, the attempt to arrest its advance by physical force had been abandoned. In Germany it covered twice the area that remained to it in the next generation, and, except in Bavaria, Catholicism was fast dying out. The Polish Government had not strength to persecute, and Poland became the refuge of the sects. When the bishops found that they could not prevent toleration, they resolved that they would not restrict it."

"The decisive struggle was in France. During the minority of Charles IX. persecution had given way to civil war, and the Regent, his mother, had vainly striven, by submitting to neither party, to uphold the authority of the Crown. She checked the victorious Catholics, by granting to the Huguenots terms which constituted them, in spite of continual disaster in the field, a vast and organised power in the State. To escape their influence it would have been necessary to invoke the help of Philip II., and to accept protection which would have made France subordinate to Spain."

"Judged by its immediate result, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a measure weakly planned and irresolutely executed, which deprived Protestantism of its political leaders, and left it for a time to the control of zealots. There is no evidence to make it probable that more than seven thousand victims perished. Judged by later events, it was the beginning of a vast change in the conflict of the churches. At first it was believed that a hundred thousand Huguenots had fallen. It was said that the survivors were abjuring by thousands, that the children of the slain were made Catholics, that those whom the priest had admitted to absolution and communion were nevertheless put to death. Men who were far beyond the reach of the French Government lost their faith in a religion which Providence had visited with so tremendous a judgment; and foreign princes took heart to employ severities which could excite no horror after the scenes in France."

"The worst criminals were not the men who did the deed. The crime of mobs and courtiers, infuriated by the lust of vengeance and of power, is not so strange a portent as the exultation of peaceful men, influenced by no present injury or momentary rage, but by the permanent and incurable perversion of moral sense wrought by a distorted piety."

"In Italy, where the life of a heretic was cheap, their wholesale destruction was confessed a highly politic and ingenious act. Even the sage Venetians were constrained to celebrate it with a procession. The Grand Duke Cosmo had pointed out two years before that an insidious peace would afford excellent opportunities of extinguishing Protestantism; and he derived inexpressible consolation from the heroic enterprise."

"A time came when the Catholics, having long relied on force, were compelled to appeal to opinion. That which had been defiantly acknowledged and defended required to be ingeniously explained away. The same motive which had justified the murder now prompted the lie. Men shrank from the conviction that the rulers and restorers of their Church had been murderers and abetters of murder, and that so much infamy had been coupled with so much zeal. They feared to say that the most monstrous of crimes had been solemnly approved at Rome, lest they should devote the Papacy to the execration of mankind. A swarm of facts were invented to meet the difficulty: The victims were insignificant in number; they were slain for no reason connected with religion; the Pope believed in the existence of the plot; the plot was a reality; the medal is fictitious; the massacre was a feint concerted with the Protestants themselves; the Pope rejoiced only when he heard that it was over. These things were repeated so often that they have been sometimes believed; and men have fallen into this way of speaking whose sincerity was unimpeachable, and who were not shaken in their religion by the errors or the vices of Popes. Möhler was pre-eminently such a man. In his lectures on the history of the Church, which were published only last year, he said that the Catholics, as such, took no part in the massacre; that no cardinal, bishop, or priest shared in the councils that prepared it; that Charles informed the Pope that a conspiracy had been discovered; and that Gregory made his thanksgiving only because the King's life was saved. Such things will cease to be written when men perceive that truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history."

"The sentiment on which [papal] infallibility was founded could not be reached by argument, the weapon of human reason, but resided in conclusions transcending evidence, and was the inaccessible postulate rather than a demonstrable consequence of a system of religious faith."

"To proclaim the Pope infallible was their compendious security against hostile States and Churches, against human liberty and authority, against disintegrating tolerance and rationalizing science, against error and sin."

"The yeoman farmers of the United States have always been the strength of the republic."

"I was struck in reading Karl Marx's new work by the extent to which he fetches his materials from England. It is a remarkable book, as the Koran of the new socialists."

"It is more essential that an enthusiast of the papacy be made to contemplate its crimes, because its influence is nearer the Conscience; and the spiritual danger of perverted morals is greater than the evil of perverted politics. It is an agency constantly active, pervading life, penetrating the soul by many channels, in almost every sermon and in almost every prayer book. It is the fiend skulking behind the Crucifix."

"Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race."

"In every age its [liberty's] progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food."

"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success."

"No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws."

"The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away."

"According to the common opinion indirect elections are a safeguard of conservatism. But all the Assemblies of the French Revolution issued from indirect elections."

"Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor of Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy..."

"[W]e are not so much concerned this evening with the dead letter of edicts and of statutes as with the living thoughts of men."

"A century ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had one audience of a Master in Chancery was made to pay for three, but no man heeded the enormity until it suggested to a young lawyer that it might be well to question and examine with rigorous suspicion every part of a system in which such things were done. The day on which that gleam lighted up the clear hard mind of Jeremy Bentham is memorable in the political calendar beyond the entire administration of many statesmen."

"It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the Five Codes of France."

"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion."

"The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation, — religion, education, and the distribution of wealth."

"In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. Liberty, by this definition, is the essential condition and guardian of religion..."

"The government of the Israelites was a , held together by no political authority, but by the unity of... faith and founded not on physical force but on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group of at least 120 families; and there was neither privilege of rank nor inequality before the law. Monarchy was so alien to the primitive spirit of the community that it was resisted by Samuel... The throne was erected on a compact; and the king was deprived of the right of legislation among a people that recognised no lawgiver but God, whose highest aim in politics was to... make its government conform to the ideal type that was hallowed by the sanctions of heaven. The inspired men who rose in unfailing succession to prophesy against the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the laws, which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers, and appealed... to the healing forces that slept in the uncorrupted consciences of the masses. Thus the... Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won—the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development... and the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man. The operation of these principles... occupies the whole of the space we are going over together."

"The conflict between liberty under divine authority and the absolutism of human authorities ended disastrously. ...In the very year 586 [BCE], in which the flood of Asiatic despotism closed over the city which had been, and was destined again to be, the sanctuary of freedom in the East, a new home was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the sea and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant was reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending its invincible arms so slowly and yet so surely over the civilised world."

"[L]liberty is ancient, and it is despotism that is new. ...The heroic age of Greece confirms it, and it is still more conspicuously true of Teutonic Europe. ...They exhibit some sense of common interest in common concerns, little reverence for external authority, and an imperfect sense of the function and supremacy of the State. Where the division of property and labour is incomplete there is little division of classes and of power. Until societies are tried by the complex problems of civilisation they may escape despotism, as societies that are undisturbed by religious diversity avoid persecution."

"Six hundred years before the birth of Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout the East it was propped by the unchanging influence of priests and armies. In the West, where there were no sacred books requiring trained interpreters, the priesthood acquired no preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown their powers passed to aristocracies of birth."

"What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,... who longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. ...rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere."

"From this universal degradation the world was rescued by the most gifted of the nations. Athens, which like other cities was distracted and oppressed by a privileged class, avoided violence and appointed Solon to revise its laws. ...Solon gave a share of power proportioned to the demands made on their resources. The poorest classes were exempt from direct taxes, but were excluded from office. Solon gave them a voice in electing magistrates from the classes above them, and the right of calling them to account. This concession... was the beginning of a mighty change. It introduced the idea that a man ought to have a voice in selecting those to whose rectitude and wisdom he is compelled to trust his fortune, his family, and his life. And this idea completely inverted the notion of human authority, for it inaugurated the reign of moral influence... Government by consent superseded government by compulsion, and the pyramid which had stood on a point was made to stand upon its base. By making every citizen the guardian of his own interest Solon admitted the element of Democracy into the State."

"Their [Athenians] history furnishes the classic example of the peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favourable. For the Athenians were not only brave and patriotic and capable of generous sacrifice, but they were the most religious of the Greeks. They venerated the constitution which had given them prosperity and equality and the pride of freedom...They tolerated considerable variety of opinion, and great license of speech...Thus they became the only people of antiquity that grew great by democratic institutions. But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs exercised its demoralizing influence on the illustrious Democracy of Athens."

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason."

"Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life."

"Increase of freedom in the state may sometimes promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the boundaries of Empire...A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be the citizen of a humble commonwealth in the Alps, without a prospect of influence beyond the narrow frontier, than a subject of a superb autocracy that overshadows half of Asia and of Europe."

"But it may be urged, on the other side, that Liberty is not the sum or substitute for of all things men ought to live for... to be real it must be circumscribed... advancing civilisation invests the state with increased rights and duties, and imposes increased burdens and constraints on the subject... a highly instructed and intelligent community may perceive the benefit of compulsory obligations which, at a lower stage, would be thought unbearable... liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims at a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but those of which it feels the advantage... a free country may be less capable of doing much for the advancement of religion, the prevention of vice, or the relief of suffering, than one that does not shrink from confronting great emergencies by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some concentration of power... the supreme political object ought to be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My argument involves no collision with these qualifying reflections. We are dealing, not with the effects of freedom, but with its causes. ...influences which brought arbitrary government under control, either by the diffusion of power, or to an appeal to an authority which transcends all government, and among these influences the greatest philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned."

"The great question is, to discover not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind."

"Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor; and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of that universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God."

"The Stoics could only advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten law in his heart. But when Christ said: "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's," those words, spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom."

"Constantine declared his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church. According to Justinian, the Roman people had formally transferred to the emperors the entire plenitude of its authority, and, therefore, the emperor’s pleasure, expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law. Even in the fervent age of its conversion the empire employed its refined civilization, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages, the reasonableness and subtlety of Roman law, and the entire inheritance of the Jewish, the pagan, and the Christian world, to make the Church serve as a gilded crutch of absolutism. Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience — a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. This vital element, which many centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression, had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient civilization, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the empire of the West."

"In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had kings, did not preside [at] their councils; they were sometimes elective; they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in obedience to the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in war. This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities, is the remote germ of parliamentary government."

"The idea that the ends of government justify the means employed, was worked into system by Machiavelli. He was an acute politician, sincerely anxious that the obstacles to the intelligent government of Italy should be swept away. It appeared to him that the most vexatious obstacle to intellect is conscience, and that the vigorous use of statecraft necessary for the success of difficult schemes would never be made if governments allowed themselves to be hampered by the precepts of the copy-book. His audacious doctrine was avowed in the succeeding age, by men whose personal character otherwise stood high. They saw that in critical times good men have seldom strength for their goodness, and yield to those who have grasped the meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if you are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality differs from private, because no government can turn the other cheek, or can admit that mercy is better than justice. And they could not define the difference, or draw the limits of exception; or tell what other standard for a nation’s acts there is than the judgment which heaven pronounces in this world by success."

"Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike."

"The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime, and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism. The clergy who had in so many ways served the cause of freedom during the prolonged strife against feudalism and slavery, were associated now with the interest of royalty."

"The tide was running fast when the Reformation began at Wittenberg, and it was to be expected that Luther’s influence would stem the flood of absolutism. For he was confronted everywhere by the compact alliance of the Church with the State; and great part of his country was governed by hostile potentates who were prelates of the court of Rome. He had, indeed, more to fear from temporal than from spiritual foes."

"Nations eagerly invested their rulers with every prerogative needed to preserve their faith, and all the care to keep Church and State asunder, and to prevent the confusion of their powers, which had been the work of ages, was renounced in the intensity of the crisis. Atrocious deeds were done, in which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy was the motive. Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians."

"John Knox thought that every Catholic in Scotland ought to be put to death; and no man ever had disciples of a sterner or more relentless temper. But his counsel was not followed. All through the religious conflict, policy kept the upper hand. When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin preached, and Bellarmine lectured; but Machiavelli reigned."

"That men should understand that governments do not exist by divine right, and that arbitrary government is the violation of divine right, was no doubt the medicine suited to the malady under which Europe languished. But although the knowledge of this truth might become an element of salutary destruction, it could give little aid to progress and reform. Resistance to tyranny implied no faculty of constructing a legal government in its place. Tyburn tree may be a useful thing; but it is better still that the offender should live for repentance and reformation. The principles which discriminate in politics between good and evil, and make states worthy to last, were not yet found."

"The French philosopher Charron was one of the men least demoralised by party spirit, and least blinded by zeal for a cause. In a passage almost literally taken from St. Thomas, he describes our subordination under the law of nature, to which all legislation must conform; and he ascertains it not by the light of revealed religion, but by the voice of universal reason, through which God enlightens the consciences of men. Upon this foundation Grotius drew the lines of real political science. In gathering the materials of International law, he had to go beyond national treaties and denominational interests, for a principle embracing all mankind. The principles of law must stand, he said, even if we suppose that there is no God. By these inaccurate terms he meant that they must be found independently of Revelation. From that time it became possible to make politics a matter of principle and of conscience, so that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace together, under the sanctions of a common law."

"It was manifest that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of good intentions which softens down the asperities of religious strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every state and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side."

"I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analyzed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is poison."

"At that time there was some truth in the old joke which describes the English dislike of speculation by saying that all our philosophy consists of a short catechism in two questions: “What is mind? No matter. — What is matter? Never mind.” The only accepted appeal was to tradition."

"The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth century."

"I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have spoken, the history of freedom was the history of the thing that was not. But since the Declaration of Independence, or, to speak more justly, since the Spaniards, deprived of their king, made a new government for themselves, the only known forms of Liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy, have made their way over the world."

"I have fixed my eyes on the spaces that heaven’s light illuminates, that I may not lay too heavy a strain on the indulgence with which you have accompanied me over the dreary and heartbreaking course by which men have passed to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be."

"The manifest, the avowed difficulty is that democracy, no less than monarchy or aristocracy, sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives, with an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot attain, to override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance and deviation, and to secure, by Plebiscite, Referendum, or Caucus, free play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. The true democratic principle, that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall never be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle, that every man‘s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing. Religious toleration, judicial independence, dread of centralisation, jealousy of State interference, become obstacles to freedom instead of safeguards, when the centralised force of the State is wielded by the hands of the people. Democracy claims to be not only supreme, without authority above, but absolute, without independence below; to be its own master, not a trustee. The old sovereigns of the world are exchanged for a new one, who may be flattered and deceived, but whom it is impossible to corrupt or to resist, and to whom must be rendered the things that are Caesar's and also the things that are God’s. The enemy to be overcome is no longer the absolutism of the State, but the liberty of the subject. Nothing is more significant than the relish with which Ferrari, the most powerful democratic writer since Rousseau, enumerates the merits of tyrants, and prefers devils to saints in the interest of the community. For the old notions of civil liberty and of social order did not benefit the masses of the people. Wealth increased, without relieving their wants. The progress of knowledge left them in abject ignorance. Religion flourished, but failed to reach them. Society, whose laws were made by the upper class alone, announced that the best thing for the poor is not to be born, and the next best to die in childhood, and suffered them to live in misery and crime and pain. As surely as the long reign of the rich has been employed in promoting the accumulation of wealth, the advent of the poor to power will be followed by schemes for diffusing it. Seeing how little was done by the wisdom of former times for education and public health, for insurance, association, and savings, for the protection of labour against the law of self-interest, and how much has been accomplished in this generation, there is reason in the fixed belief that a great change was needed, and that democracy has not striven in vain. Liberty, for the mass, is not happiness; and institutions are not an end but a means. The thing they seek is a force sufficient to sweep away scruples and the obstacle of rival interests, and, in some degree, to better their condition. They mean that the strong hand that heretofore has formed great States, protected religions, and defended the independence of nations, shall help them by preserving life, and endowing it for them with some, at least, of the things men live for. That is the notorious danger of modern democracy. That is also its purpose and its strength. And against this threatening power the weapons that struck down other despots do not avail. The greatest happiness principle positively confirms it. The principle of equality, besides being as easily applied to property as to power, opposes the existence of persons or groups of persons exempt from the common law, and independent of the common will; and the principle, that authority is a matter of contract, may hold good against kings, but not against the sovereign people, because a contract implies two parties."

"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. To break off that point is to avert the danger. The common system of representation perpetuates the danger. Unequal electorates afford no security to majorities. Equal electorates give none to minorities. Thirty-five years ago it was pointed out that the remedy is proportional representation. It is profoundly democratic, for it increases the influence of thousands who would otherwise have no voice in the government; and it brings men more near an equality by so contriving that no vote shall be wasted, and that every voter shall contribute to bring into Parliament a member of his own opinions."

"The great object, in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific, is to get behind men and to grasp ideas. Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own, in which men play the part of godfathers and godmothers more than that of legitimate parents. We understand the work and place of Pascal, or Newton, or Montesquieu, or Adam Smith, when we have measured the gap between the state of astronomy, of political economy, &c., before they came and after they were gone. And the progress of the science is of more use to us than the idiosyncrasy of the man."

"I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone better in speaking."

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means."

"The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest."

"ADVICE TO PERSONS ABOUT TO WRITE HISTORY — DON’T In the Moral Sciences Prejudice is Dishonesty. A Historian has to fight against temptations special to his mode of life, temptations from Country, Class, Church, College, Party, Authority of talents, solicitation of friends. The most respectable of these influences are the most dangerous. The historian who neglects to root them out is exactly like a juror who votes according to his personal likes or dislikes. In judging men and things Ethics go before Dogma, Politics or Nationality. The Ethics of History cannot be denominational. Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience. Put conscience above both system and success. History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong."

"Nationality is the great carrier of custom, of unreflecting habit and transmitted ideas that quench individuality. Conscience gives men force to resist and discard all this. Nationality has to be dealt with discriminatingly. It is not always liberal or constructive. It may be as dangerous when its boundary is outside that of the State as salutary when inside."

"Don't suspect me of denying the principle of nationality altogether. Only, if I were to say as much as you say, I should be afraid of being driven to admit the priority of National Independence before individual liberty,—of the figurative conscience before the real. We do not find that Nationalists are always Liberals, especially in Austria."

"We are forced, in equity, to share the government with the working class...If there is a free contract, in open market, between capital and labour, it cannot be right that one of the two contracting parties should have the making of the laws, the management of the conditions, the keeping of the peace, the administration of justice, the distribution of taxes, the control of expenditure, in its own hands exclusively. It is unjust that all these securities, all these advantages, should be on the same side...Before this argument the ancient dogma, that power attends on property, broke down. Justice required that property should-not abdicate, but-share its political supremacy."

"There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Error."

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class."

"The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation."

"Almost all that has been done for the good of the people has been done since the right lost the monopoly of power, since the rights of property were discovered to be not unlimited."

"The immediate purpose with which the Italians and Germans effected the great change in European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed, not securities, but forces. Machiavelli's hour had come."

"If it can be shown that the majority of women will probably be Liberal, or that they will divide equally, I should say that the balance is, very slightly, in favour of giving them votes."

"[I]t will not do to act as if the moral question was not the supreme question in public life, and, in a sense, the vera causa of party conflict."

"By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of Mankind."

"General principles were so little apparent in the system that excellent writers suppose that the Whigs were essentially English, Nonconformists, associated with limited monarchy, unfit for exportation over the world. They took long to outgrow the narrow limits of the society in which they arose. A hundred years passed before Whiggism assumed the universal and scientific character. In the American speeches of Chatham and Camden, in Burke's writings from 1778 to 1783, in the Wealth of Nations, and the tracts of Sir William Jones, there is an immense development. The national bounds are overcome. The principles are sacred, irrespective of interests. The charter of Rhode Island is worth more than the British Constitution, and Whig statesmen toast General Washington, rejoice that America has resisted, and insist on the acknowledgment of independence. The progress is entirely consistent; and Burke's address to the colonists is the logical outcome of the principles of liberty and the notion of a higher law above municipal codes and constitutions, with which Whiggism began."

"[T]he Revolution of 1688...is the greatest thing done by the English nation. It established the State upon a contract, and set up the doctrine that a breach of contract forfeited the crown. ... Parliament gave the crown, and gave it under conditions. Parliament became supreme in administration as well as in legislation. The king became its servant on good behaviour, liable to dismissal for himself or his ministers. All this was not restitution, but inversion. Passive obedience had been the law of England. Conditional obedience and the right of resistance became the law. Authority was limited and regulated and controlled. The Whig theory of government was substituted for the Tory theory on the fundamental points of political science. The great achievement is that this was done without bloodshed, without vengeance, without exclusion of entire parties, with so little definiteness in point of doctrine that it could be accepted, and the consequences could be left to work themselves out."

"I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are the registered property of every school; that is to say — learn as much by writing as by reading; be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause of the weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice, and study problems in preference to periods."

"Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present."

"Praise is the shipwreck of historians."

"It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which, as the earthly wants and the passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark of history."

"History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active."

"Liberalism is really opposed to liberty. ... Modern liberalism in England as well as abroad, in America as well as in Europe, has done more to destroy liberty than monarchy has done."

"What one hears in Ranke. The whisper of statecraft. Not the tramp of democracy's earthquake feet. Not the dull roar of surging opinion."

"Sagacity in judging the value of testimony is his [Ranke's] only supreme quality."

"The Massacre of St. Bartholomew saved England. Coligny would have conquered Belgium."

"There is no example of liberty established by Protestants resisting Catholics. The French tried it and failed. The Dutch in like manner. The victory came out of the conflict of Protestants with Protestants."

"Reformation. Scotland is the only kingdom in which the change was accomplished in spite of the crown. Ireland the only country where it was prevented in spite of the crown."

"Religious liberty came not from the Reformation or from the sects as a whole but from particular sects...especially those which the Reformation sought to exterminate."

"The only resistance ever made to Louis XIV was from religion."

"The early history of the world is the history of a few great men. Their Wirkungskreis is immense—vaster than that of God himself."

"The lesson of modern history—that Religions enjoy (are endowed with) the prerogative of perpetual youth while philosophies seldom outlast a generation."

"Liberty becomes a question of morals more that politics."

"Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force."

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being."

"Property, not Conscience, is the basis of liberty. For the defence of Conscience need not arise. Property is always exposed to State interference. It is the constant object of policy."

"The strongest of all the obstacles to progress, the reign of the dead."

"Socialism. Sanctioned by Religion, by philosophy, by the experience of great nations—Revelation. Catholic and Protestant authorities supported it. ... Idea not repugnant to Canon Law, of administering the wealth of the rich for the good of the poor. ... Socialism common wherever there is intense religious zeal."

"Socialism the worst of all enemies of freedom because, if it could fulfil what it promises, it would render such a service to the world that the interests of freedom would pale, and mankind would carry over its allegiance to the benefactor who had a higher claim on its gratitude. ... This century has seen the growth of the worst enemy freedom has ever had to encounter—Socialism. Strong, because it solves a problem pol[itical] economy has, until now, failed to solve. How to provide that the increase of wealth shall not be at the expense of its distribution. ... Can only be realised by a tremendous despotism."

"S. B. is the greatest crime of modern times. It was committed on principles professed by Rome. It was approved, sanctioned, praised by the papacy. The Holy See went out of its way to signify to the world, by permanent and solemn acts, how entirely it admired a king who slaughtered his subjects treacherously, because they were Protestants. To proclaim forever that because a man is a Protestant it is a pious deed to cut his throat in the night."

"Democracy is government of the strongest, just as military despotism is. This is a bond of connection between the two. They are the brutal forms of government and as strength and authority go together, necessarily arbitrarily."

"A government which cannot be reformed does not merit to be preserved."

"Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences injurious to society and morality. Therefore, in last resort, the poor have a claim on the wealth of the rich, so far that they may be relieved from the immoral, demoralizing effects of poverty."

"Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the tablets of eternity."

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."

"He represented to a world not altogether sympathetic the worth and dignity of historical studies. He showed their real importance for a right understanding of the destiny of man, however regarded. He demonstrated also in his own person that history was not at once the Cinderella of the sciences and the playmate of the arts, below scientific inquiry as a means of training the mind to exact thought, and behind classical studies as an instrument of culture; but that if properly and consistently pursued it was a mental gymnastic of the highest order, and a great trainer in patience, sympathy, and refinement. He made history respectable."

"Twenty years ago, late at night, in his library at Cannes, he expounded to me his view of how such a history of Liberty might be written, and in what wise it might be made the central thread of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes only; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again."

"Men during the World War used to recall the prescience of Acton when he declared that the bayonets of Berlin constituted the most serious menace to our Empire."

"We can picture his mind as constantly knitting history together, then; and, though he failed to produce his magnum opus, he left behind him in his papers a tremendous intellectual system, which has stimulated many commentators and interpreters in our time... [B]ehind the multitude of Acton's reflective notes there is an intellectual system (and a record of the man's achievement) ampler and richer and more imposing than the published writings would suggest. The notes are an evidence of Acton's amazing intellectual integrity, his determination to confront the discrepant fact and not to shrink from the inconvenient anomaly."

"To-morrow I am going to London to meet at dinner Lord Acton, whom I have long been pining to see. He is a Roman Catholic, and is the most learned Englishman now alive, but he never writes anything."

"I have had a long correspondence with Lord Acton, and now begin to understand him. He demands that history should be primarily a branch of the moral sciences, and should aim at proving the immutable righteousness of the ideas of modern Liberalism—tolerance and the supremacy of conscience. He has used me as a peg to indicate that belief. He is revising his original remarks, but I do not expect that much clearness will ensue, though it will be very interesting."

"Acton may have been a wise man, but he was an indifferent historian, often surprised by the discovery of intrigue or double-dealing behind an official façade into a somewhat amateurish reaction: astonishment at the commonplace, overemphasis on the insignificant, heavily moral attitudes."

"[Acton knew] at least four foreign languages, and probably read and annotated more printed matter than anyone who has ever lived. And he was cosmopolitan in the intimate as well as in the superficial sense, for as a liberal Roman Catholic he was equally versed in the literature of authority and revolt, and knew, as no other Englishman, the great central tradition of post-Tridentine theology."

"Fri. a long talk with Ld. Acton in the garden, an hour and ½, mostly about various people and rather amusing. He has a shrewd eye for character, and yet charitable."

"He [Lord Acton] gave Herbert and me the History of Liberty, a sketch of it, most interesting. It is extraordinary the way he tingles with it to his fingers ends and yet can sit patient and quiet over wife and children and wait and wait another year before he writes it. What an extraordinary man."

"[Lord Acton's character] is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the day."

"His work may be put on the Index; but that is all. They will never excommunicate an English Peer. I always say that, if Lord Acton had written what Döllinger has written, and vice versa, it would still have been the Professor who would have got into trouble, while the Peer would have escaped scot free."

"Johnny Acton, who is extremely agreeable, left us two or three days ago to go to Germany, with the intention of coming back to study in the middle of October. His library is becoming immense. He has remodelled the old library. He has entirely filled the hall; he has furnished his own room with books, and he has bagged a bedroom for the same purpose. I can hardly open a book without finding notes or marks of his."

"[A] master of contemporary history...an impartial judge of modern England, so European, so supernational, so catholic, so liberal, so wise, so Olympian, so serene."

"In truth, the main characteristic of these men was vanity—intellectual and literary. They had the inflation of German professors, and the ruthless talk of undergraduates."

"Friendship is a relation that has many types. On none did I presume to set a more special value than on my intercourse with this observant, powerful, reflective, marvellously full mind. He saw both past history as a whole and modern politics as a whole. He was a profound master of all the lights and shades of ecclesiastical system; a passionately interested master of the bonds between moral truth and the action of political system; an eager explorer of the ideas that help to govern the rise and fall of States; and a scrupulous student of the march of fact, circumstance, and personality in which such ideas worked themselves through. He was comprehensive as an encyclopaedia, but profound and rich, not tabulated and dry."

"He was not without some intellectual difficulties for us to reconcile. The union of devoted faith in liberty with devoted adherence to the Church of authority was a standing riddle. His conception of history as a business of wide general forces did not easily fit in with his untiring hunt for incidents on the political backstairs, as the historian's most precious and decisive prizes. He was sometimes fatally addicted to the oblique and the allusive, as if he might enjoy playing hide-and-seek with the well-meaning reader. He winds up his weighty—almost too weighty—introduction to Machiavelli's Prince with the remark that the nineteenth century had seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime. I often challenged him for the precise list of this tremendous Newgate Calendar; I could never induce him to disclose more than a dozen."

"If the gods granted me the privilege of recalling to life for half an hour's conversation some of the great men of the past I have had the good fortune to know, I should say Acton."

"I went down into Shropshire to look at that famous library before it was removed to Cambridge. There were shelves on shelves of books on every conceivable subject—Renaissance Sorcery, the Fueros of Aragon, Scholastic Philosophy, the Growth of the French Navy, American Exploration, Church Councils. The owner had read them all, and many of them were full in their margins with cross-references in pencil. There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section... I never saw a sight that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning. A quarter of the time that had been spent on making those marginal annotations, and filling those pigeon-holes might have produced a dozen volumes of sound and valuable history—perhaps an epoch-making book that might have lived for centuries. But all the accumulated knowledge had vanished... And I said to myself—intensive research, even by the most competent researcher, is wasted, unless the results are put together and printed."

"Lord Acton, a historian to whom learning and judgment had not been granted in equal proportions, and who, after years of incredible and indeed well-nigh mythical research, had come to the conclusion that the Pope could err."

"Lord Acton is probably the greatest historian whose books were never written."

"Lord Acton had great personal charm and delighted all with whom he came in contract by his amiability and exquisite courtesy. A decided indolence of disposition, a certain mental timidity, a distinct want of national fibre, were his main imperfections. With greater moral courage and a more sturdy literary conscience Lord Acton would undoubtedly have made a more striking mark in letters and in public affairs; but his life, as it was, remains a splendid example of devotion to study, to historical research, and to the cause of truth."

"Lord Acton, one of the greatest minds among modern Western historians, in whose career the sterilizing influence of Industrialism upon historical thought is tragically apparent."

"Dons of all subjects crowded to his oracular lectures, which were sometimes puzzling but always impressive. He had the brow of Plato, and the bearing of a sage who was also a man of the great world... What he said was always interesting, but sometimes strange. I remember, for instance, his saying to me that States based on the unity of a single race, like modern Italy and Germany, would prove a danger to liberty; I did not see what he meant at the time, but I do now!"

"Lord Acton... [is] the nearest approach to omniscience I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Theodore Parker."

"Lord Acton was a thorough man of the world. An insatiable, systematic, and effective reader, he was anything but a recluse. No man had a keener zest for the society of his intellectual equals. ...His learning, though vast and genuine, was never obtruded. Always ready to impart information, he shrank from the semblance of volunteering it. ...he would let people without a tithe of his knowledge lay down the law as if they knew everything, and would betray no other sign of amusement than an enigmatical smile. He had something of Addison's tendency... to draw out rather than to repress the sallies of conceited ignorance. But for any one who wished to learn, his resources were in their fullest extent available. To be in his company was like being in the best of historical libraries with the best of historical catalogues."

"His general attitude was one of rigid adhesion to certain facts, and careful avoidance of hasty judgments. Few people had stronger opinions than he, and their foundation was so solid that it was almost impossible to displace them. But he liked to hear all sides of every question, and to make allowance for all errors which did not involve a violation of the moral law. Any apology or even excuse for departure from the highway of the Decalogue he regarded as in itself a crime."

"A merciless intellectual critic he could hardly help being. He had so trained and furnished his mind that it rejected instinctively a sophism or a false pretence."

"He was a good talker because he was a good listener, always interested in the subject, not seeking to exhaust it, rather putting in from time to time the exactly appropriate word."

"His great work should have been, and was intended to be, a History of Liberty. For that purpose his library at Aldenham was collected, and to frame different definitions of liberty was one of his favourite pastimes. He loved liberty with all the ardour of Milton, and investigated it with all the science of Locke. ...This History was never written, nor even begun. All that there is of it, all that there ever was of it, except books and notes, materials for others to use, consists of two lectures delivered at Bridgnorth in the year 1877. One was called "The History of Freedom in Antiquity," and the other "The History of Freedom in Christianity." ...they are full of suggestion and insight. Their fault is that... they pour a quart of liquor into a pint pot. They are so much crowded with names and references, that to follow the chief thread of the argument is made needlessly hard. ...A geographer may have too many names in his map, and a learned man may condense his knowledge until it has no meaning for those who know less than himself. But, on the other hand, these lectures contain passages at once lucid and worth their weight in gold, which could only have come from a mind at once acute, meditative, and well stored."

"[I]t is indeed far removed from the sensual idolatry of mere size that vulgarises modern Imperialism. But it was with Lord Acton a fundamental principle and it is not the size of Periclean Athens, or of Elizabethan England, which made them imperishably great. ...We must look, Lord Acton warns us, to substance and essence, not to form and outward show. The martyrdom of Socrates was the act of a free Republic, and it was Caesar who liberated Rome from the tyranny of Republican institutions. The fault of the classical State was that it tried to be Church and State in one, and thus infringed upon individualism by regulating religion. The three things wanting in ancient liberty were representative government, emancipation of slaves, and freedom of conscience."

"Ever since his visit to America in the days of President Pierce, if not before, Acton had made a special study of the American Constitution in its strength and its weakness, in the amplitude of its safeguards, and in its fatal want of elasticity. A Monarchy cannot be too constitutional. But a too constitutional Republic is a difficult machine to work. England, said a French critic, is a Republic with an hereditary President: the United States are a Monarchy with an elected King."

"Notwithstanding Lord Acton's minute and conscientious accuracy in points of detail, he is always best and most characteristic in broad, luminous inferences from large masses of history and long periods of time. ...He showed that for eleven hundred years, from the first Constantine to the last, the Christian Empire was as despotic as the pagan; that it was Gregory the Seventh who made the Papacy independent of the empire; that Luther bequeathed as his political testament the doctrines of Divine right and passive obedience; and that Spanish Jesuits, in arguing against the title of Henry the Fourth to the throne of France, had anticipated the doctrines of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau."

"Passing on... to the dynastic change of 1688, he described the Whig settlement, not as a Venetian oligarchy, but as an aristocracy of freeholders, while from the American rebellion of the following century he drew the moral that a revolution with very little provocation may be just, and a democracy of very large dimensions may be safe. The defect in the principles of 1789 was that they exalted equality at the expense of liberty, and subjected the free will of the individual to the unbridled power of the State."

"He knew almost everybody worth knowing, and no one so fond of study was ever more sociable. But, as these letters show, the man whom above all others he esteemed and revered was Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone, with characteristic humility, always deferred to Lord Acton's judgment in matters historical. On the other hand, Lord Acton, the most hypercritical of men, and the precise opposite of a hero-worshipper, an iconoclast if ever there was one, regarded Mr. Gladstone as the first of English statesmen, living or dead."

"[W]hat could never be reproduced is the general impression of Acton's many contributions to the Rambler, the Home and Foreign, and the '. ...Any one who wished to understand the personality of Acton could not do better than take the published Bibliography and read a few of the articles on "contemporary literature" furnished by him to the three Reviews. In no other way could the reader so clearly realise the complexity of his mind or the vast number of subjects which he could touch with the hand of a master. ...His writing before he was thirty years of age shows an intimate and detailed knowledge of documents and authorities which with most students is the "hard won and hardly won" achievement of a lifetime of labour. ...he treats of matters which range from the dawn of history through the ancient empires down to subjects ...essentially modern ...In all these writings of Acton those qualities manifest themselves, which... gave him a distinct and unique place among his contemporaries. Here is the same austere love of truth, the same resolve to dig to the bed-rock of fact, and to exhaust all sources of possible illumination, the same breadth of view and intensity of inquiring ardour, which stimulated his studies and limited his productive power. Above all, there is the same unwavering faith in principles, as affording the only criterion of judgment amid the ever-fluctuating welter of human passions, political manœuvring, and ecclesiastical intrigue."

"We note the same value for great books as the source of wisdom, combined with the same enthusiasm for immediate justice which made Acton the despair of the mere academic student, an enigma among men of the world, and a stumbling block to the politician of the clubs. ...we find that certainty and decision of judgment, that crisp concentration of phrase, that grave and deliberate irony and that mastery of subtlety, allusion, and wit, which make his interpretation an adventure and his judgment a sword."

"The ardour of his opinions, so different from those which have usually distorted history, gives an interest even to his grossest errors."

"Perhaps... the most characteristic of these forgotten judgments is the description of Lord Liverpool and the class which supported him. Not even Disraeli, painting the leader of that party which he was destined so strangely to "educate," could equal the austere and accurate irony with which Acton, writing as a student, not as a novelist, sums up the characteristics of the class of his birth."

"The longer essays republished in these volumes exhibit... a personality which even those who disagreed with his views must allow to have been one of the most remarkable products of European culture in the nineteenth century."

"During the first period—roughly to be dated from 1855 to 1863—he was hopefully striving, under the influence of Döllinger (his teacher from the age of seventeen) to educate his co-religionists in breadth and sympathy, and to place before his countrymen ideals of right in politics, which were to him bound up with the Catholic faith. The combination of scientific inquiry with true rules of political justice he claimed, in a letter to Döllinger, as the aim of the Home and Foreign Review. ...a quarterly ...far surpassing, alike in knowledge, range, and certainty, any of the other quarterlies, political, or ecclesiastical, or specialist, which the nineteenth century produced. ...superior, while it displayed a cosmopolitan interest foreign to most English journals."

"Next came... the "fighting period," when he stood forth as the leader among laymen of the party opposed to that "insolent and aggressive faction" which achieved its imagined triumph at the Vatican Council. This period,... dated from the issue of the Syllabus by Pius IX. in 1864, may be considered to close with the reply to Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet on "The Vatican Decrees," and with the attempt of the famous Cardinal, in whose mind history was identified with heresy, to drive from the Roman communion its most illustrious English layman."

"We may date the third period of Acton's life from the failure of Manning's attempt, or indeed a little earlier. He had now given up all attempt to contend against the dominant influence of the Court of Rome, though feeling that loyalty to the Church... as a living body was independent of the disastrous policy of its hierarchy. During this time he was occupied with the great unrealised project of the history of liberty or in movements of English politics... In the earlier part of this period are... some of the best things that Acton ever wrote, such as the lectures on Liberty... It is characterised by his discovery in the "eighties" that Döllinger and he were divided on the question of the severity of condemnation to be passed on persecutors and their approvers. ...Finding that he had misunderstood his master, Acton was for a time profoundly discouraged, declared himself isolated, and surrendered the outlook of literary work as vain. He found... that in ecclesiastical as in general politics he was alone, however much he might sympathise with others up to a certain point. On the other hand, these years witnessed a gradual mellowing of his judgment in regard to the prospects of the Church, and its capacity to absorb and interpret in a harmless sense the dogma against whose promulgation he had fought so eagerly. ...the English element in Acton came out most strongly in this period, closing as it did with the Cambridge Professorship, and including the development of the friendship between himself and Mr. Gladstone."

"There were in him strains of many races. On his father's side he was an English country squire, but foreign residence and the Neapolitan Court had largely affected the family, in addition to that flavour of cosmopolitan culture which belongs to the more highly placed Englishmen of the Roman Communion. On his mother's side he was a member of one of the oldest and greatest families in Germany... The s... had intermarried with an Italian family, the Brignoli. Trained first at Oscott under Wiseman, and afterwards at Munich under Döllinger, in whose house he lived, Acton by education as well as birth was a cosmopolitan, while his marriage with the family of Arco-Valley introduced a further strain of Bavarian influence into his life. His mother's second marriage with Lord Granville brought him into connection with the dominant influences of the great Whig Houses."

"I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly."

"We should be tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime."

"The news bulletins of the last week have been like hammer blows struck against the sleeping conscience of the country, urging us to wake up and look unflinchingly at what we see... A solution to this disintegration doesn't simply lie in legislation. It must come from the rediscovery of a sense of direction as a country and most of all from being unafraid to start talking once again about the values and principles we believe in and what they mean for us, not just as individuals but as a community. We cannot exist in a moral vacuum. If we do not learn and then teach the value of what is right and what is wrong, then the result is simply moral chaos which engulfs us all..."

"The importance of the notion of community is that it defines the relationship not only between us as individuals but between people and the society in which they live, one that is based on responsibilities as well as rights, on obligations as well as entitlements. Self-respect is in part derived from respect for others."

"It is largely from family discipline that social discipline and a sense of responsibility is learnt. A modern notion of society – where rights and responsibilities go together – requires responsibility to be nurtured. Out of a family grows the sense of community. The family is the starting place... All other things being equal, it is easier to do the difficult job of bringing up a child where there are two parents living happily together... If the old left tended to ignore the importance of the family, the new right ignores the conditions in which family life can most easily prosper."

"I shall not rest until, once again, the destinies of our people and our party are joined together again in victory at the next general election Labour in its rightful place in government again."

"The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes."

"Any parent wants the best for their children. I am not going to make a choice for my child on the basis of what is the politically correct thing to do."

"Tony Blair: Has the Prime Minister secured even the minimal guarantee from the Euro-rebels that, on a future vote of confidence on Europe, they will support him? John Major: I can sense the concern in the right hon. Gentleman's voice. Perhaps he would like to tell me whether he has received the support of the 50 MPs who defied his Front Bench over Maastricht; of the 40 who defied him over European finance; on a single currency, where the right hon. Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) was in dispute with the deputy leader of the Labour party; and on clause IV, which half his, I think he called them, infantile MEPs want to keep. He does not, and his deputy leader does one day and does not the next. These are party matters. Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us what his position is? Tony Blair: There is one very big difference—I lead my party, he follows his."

"We have no plans to increase tax at all."

"I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country."

"I want to see a publicly-owned railway, publicly accountable."

"The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth, and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few."

"Socialism for me was never about nationalization or the power of the state, not just about economics or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life, a set of values, a belief in society, in co-operation, in achieving together what we cannot achieve alone. It is how I try to live my life, how you try to live yours—the simple truths—I am worth no more than anyone else, I am my brother’s keeper, I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism and the irony of all our long years in opposition is that those values are shared by the vast majority of the British people."

"I can't stand politicians who wear God on their sleeves."

"Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education and education. We are 35th in the world league of education standards – 35th. At every level, radical improvement and reform."

"If there are further steps to European integration, the people should have their say at a general election or in a referendum."

"In the end there is no escaping from the fact that businesses run business. And the best thing government can do is set a framework within which business has the stability to plan and invest in the future [...] I want a situation more like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US. People don't even question for a single moment that the Democrats are pro-business party. They should not be asking the question about the New Labour [...] New Labour is pro-business, pro-enterprise, and we believe there is nothing inconsistent between that and a decent and just society."

"Isn't it extraordinary that the Prime Minister of our country can't even urge his Party to back his own position. Weak! Weak! Weak!"

"Powers that are constitutionally there can be used but the Scottish Labour Party is not planning to raise income tax and once the power is given it is like any parish council: it's got the right to exercise it."

"Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP and that's the way it will stay."

"A new dawn has broken, has it not?"

"My message to Sinn Fein is clear. The settlement train is leaving. I want you on that train. But it is leaving anyway and I will not allow it to wait for you."

"I was born in 1953, a child of the Cold War era, raised amid the constant fear of a conflict with the potential to destroy humanity. Whatever other dangers may exist, no such fear exists today. Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value."

"She was the people's princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever."

"I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper. I think most people who have dealt with me think I'm a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am."

"A day like today is not a day for, sort of, soundbites, really - we can leave those at home - but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders, I really do."

"We do, as a new Government, have to be extremely careful after 18 years in opposition. A lot of people who worked for us, they then go on and work for the lobby firms. I think we have to be very careful with people fluttering around the new Government, trying to make all sorts of claims of influence, that we are purer than pure, that people understand that we will not have any truck with anything that is improper in any shape or form at all."

"A New Britain where the extraordinary talent of the British people is liberated from the forces of conservatism that so long have held them back, to create a model 21st century nation, based not on privilege, class or background, but on the equal worth of all."

"I can stand here today, leader of the Labour Party, Prime Minister, and say to the British people: you have never had it so … prudent."

"We have done all that, but lots of people like you say because it's not perfect, you've done nothing and therefore I'm walking away from it – it's pathetic. And as for this rubbish that we took the whole of the social services budget and blew it on Kosovo – first of all, the figures are nonsense; secondly, I want to tell you this about Kosovo. I think the day that this movement, with its values, when we could do something about it, would walk away from the worst case of ethnic cleansing and racial genocide since the second world war, then we'd have something to be ashamed of."

"There have been the most terrible, shocking events taking place in the United States of America within the last hour or so, including two hijacked planes being flown deliberately into the World Trade Center. I am afraid we can only imagine the terror and the carnage there and the many, many innocent people who will have lost their lives. I know that you would want to join with me in sending the deepest condolences to President Bush and to the American people on behalf of the British people at these terrible events.This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it together and eradicate this evil completely from our world."

"When we act to bring to account those that committed the atrocity of September 11, we do so, not out of bloodlust. We do so because it is just. We do not act against Islam. The true followers of Islam are our brothers and sisters in this struggle. Bin Laden is no more obedient to the proper teaching of the Koran than those Crusaders of the 12th century who pillaged and murdered, represented the teaching of the Gospel. It is time the west confronted its ignorance of Islam. Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham. This is the moment to bring the faiths closer together in understanding of our common values and heritage, a source of unity and strength. It is time also for parts of Islam to confront prejudice against America and not only Islam but parts of western societies too. America has its faults as a society, as we have ours. But I think of the Union of America born out of the defeat of slavery. I think of its Constitution, with its inalienable rights granted to every citizen still a model for the world. I think of a black man, born in poverty, who became chief of their armed forces and is now secretary of state Colin Powell and I wonder frankly whether such a thing could have happened here. I think of the Statue of Liberty and how many refugees, migrants and the impoverished passed its light and felt that if not for them, for their children, a new world could indeed be theirs. I think of a country where people who do well, don't have questions asked about their accent, their class, their beginnings but have admiration for what they have done and the success they've achieved. I think of those New Yorkers I met, still in shock, but resolute; the fire fighters and police, mourning their comrades but still head held high. I think of all this and I reflect: yes, America has its faults, but it is a free country, a democracy, it is our ally and some of the reaction to September 11 betrays a hatred of America that shames those that feel it. So I believe this is a fight for freedom. And I want to make it a fight for justice too. Justice not only to punish the guilty. But justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world. And I mean: freedom, not only in the narrow sense of personal liberty but in the broader sense of each individual having the economic and social freedom to develop their potential to the full. That is what community means, founded on the equal worth of all. The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause. This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us. Today, humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can't make that choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community, can. "By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone". For those people who lost their lives on September 11 and those that mourn them; now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial."

"For the moment, let me say this: Saddam Hussein's regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also."

"I don't like it, to be honest, when politicians make a big thing of their religious beliefs, so I don't make a big thing of it."

"Look, I'm a person, an individual with a character and part of my character is about what I believe in and part of my beliefs obviously is a religious conviction. I simply hesitate whenever I get drawn into this territory because I have found, over time, that it either leads to people misunderstanding the basis upon which you are taking decisions or it leads to people trying to colonise God or religion for one particular political position. I make no claims to that at all."

"[The Joint Intelligence Committee] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability."

"Sometimes, and in particular dealing with a dictator, the only chance of peace is a readiness for war."

"Lead me into war...you know I believe in you."

"The intelligence is clear: [Saddam Hussein] continues to believe that his weapons of mass destruction programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. It is essential to his regional power. Prior to the inspectors coming back in, he was engaged in a systematic exercise in concealment of those weapons."

"I've never claimed to have a monopoly of wisdom, but one thing I've learned in this job is you should always try to do the right thing, not the easy thing. Let the day-to-day judgments come and go: be prepared to be judged by history."

"If we don't act now, we can't keep those people down there forever. We can't wait forever. If we don't act now, then we will go back to what has happened before and then of course the whole thing begins again and he carries on developing these weapons and these are dangerous weapons, particularly if they fall into the hands of terrorists who we know want to use these weapons if they can get them."

"We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years–contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence–Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd."

"This is the time not just for this Government–or, indeed, for this Prime Minister—but for this House to give a lead: to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right; to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk; to show, at the moment of decision, that we have the courage to do the right thing."

"Before people crow about the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, I suggest they wait a bit."

"As I have said throughout, I have no doubt that they will find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction."

"What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can you should."

"We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves."

"I thought that it was the most predictable speech that we could have heard from the right hon. and learned Gentleman. He may want to pose as the nice Dr. Jekyll, but we know that, deep down, he is still the same old Mr. Howard."

"It has been an unrelenting, but, I have to accept, at least partly successful campaign to persuade Britain that Europe is a conspiracy aimed at us, rather than a partnership designed for us and others to pursue our national interest properly in a modern, interdependent world. It is right to confront this campaign head on. Provided that the treaty embodies the essential British positions, we shall agree to it as a Government. Once agreed – either at the June Council, which is our preference, or subsequently – Parliament should debate it in detail and decide upon it. Then, let the people have the final say."

"What you can't do is have a situation where you get a rejection of the treaty and then you just bring it back with a few amendments and say we will have another go. You can't do that and I am not going to get drawn into speculating the way forward because I don't intend to lose the referendum."

"Today's strategy is the culmination of a journey of change both for progressive politics and for the country. It marks the end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order."

"But with this change in the 1960s came something else, not necessarily because of it but alongside it. It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility. But in the 1960's revolution, that didn't always happen. Law and order policy still focussed on the offender's rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality. All through the 1970s and 1980s, under Labour and Conservative Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice. Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility. The worst criminals became better organised and more violent. The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense. And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others."

"Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus. People do not want a return to old prejudices and ugly discrimination. But they do want rules, order and proper behaviour. They know there is such a thing as society. They want a society of respect. They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge; where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don't, get punished."

"Do I know I'm right? Judgements aren't the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I'm like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong. I only know what I believe."

"Don't say yes to that question, that would be difficult."

"It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us in Europe to ridicule American argument or parody their political leadership."

"Sir Michael Spicer: What are the characteristics of old Labour that he dislikes so much? Tony Blair: I am afraid that the Hon. Gentleman will have to repeat that. Sir Michael Spicer: What are the characteristics of old Labour that he dislikes so much? Tony Blair: Basically, that it never won two successive terms of Government and, perhaps, that it never put the Conservative party flat on its back, which is where it is now. Thankfully, we are running an economy with low inflation, low mortgage rates and low unemployment; fortunately, we are doing a darn sight better than the Government of whom the right hon. Gentleman was a Member, who had—I thank him for allowing me to mention this—interest rates at 10 per cent. for four years, 3 million unemployed and two recessions. Whether it is old Labour or new Labour, it is a darn sight better than the Tories."

"I fear my own conscience on Africa. I fear the judgement of future generations, where history properly calculates the gravity of the suffering. I fear them asking: but how could wealthy people, so aware of such suffering, so capable of acting, simply turn away to busy themselves with other things? What greater call to action could there be? Did they really know and yet do nothing? I feel that judgement of the future alongside the now. It gives me urgency. It fills me with determination."

"Yes, I did have to struggle very hard to get this [the vote on the Iraq war] through, but the reason I did it was because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't take this on myself... just because I thought, 'Let's give myself a really hard time for a couple of years!'"

"I understand there is a need for a stable and orderly transition to that leadership, but that people should give me the space to ensure that happens and that this debate is not best conducted in the pages of the Mail on Sunday."

"Ideals survive through change. They die through inertia in the face of challenge."

"It is important that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world."

"The spirit of our age is one in which the prejudices of the past are put behind us, where our diversity is our strength. It is this which is under attack. Moderates are not moderate through weakness but through strength. Now is the time to show it in defence of our common values."

"The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge."

"Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing."

"There were people who got me very involved in politics. But then there was also a book. It was a trilogy, a biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher, which made a very deep impression on me and gave me a love of political biography for the rest of my life."

"This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation."

"To state a timetable now would simply paralyze the proper working of government, put at risk the changes we are making for Britain and damage the country."

"He is honey."

"I condemn utterly these brutal and shameful attacks. There can never be any justification for terrorism. Our thoughts are with the victims and their families. We stand united with India, as the world's largest democracy who share our values and determination to defeat terrorism in all its forms."

"We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world."

"He wants a Bill of Rights for Britain drafted by a Committee of Lawyers. Have you ever tried drafting anything with a Committee of Lawyers?"

"In this day and age if you've got the technology then it's vital to use that technology to track people down. The number on the database should be the maximum number you can get."

"That's the art of leadership. To make sure that what shouldn't happen, doesn't happen."

"I couldn't live with myself if I thought that these big strategic choices for my generation were there, and I wasn't even making them – or I was making them according to what was expedient rather than what I actually thought was right."

"In respect of knife and gun gangs, the laws need to be significantly toughened. There needs to be an intensive police focus on these groups. The ring-leaders need to be identified and taken out of circulation; if very young, as some are, put in secure accommodation. The black community – the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law-abiding people horrified at what is happening – need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids. But we won't stop this by pretending it isn't young black kids doing it."

"Economic inequality is a factor and we should deal with that, but I don't think it's the thing that is producing the most violent expression of this social alienation. I think that is to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them."

"So, of course, the visions are painted in the colours of the rainbow, and the reality is sketched in duller tones of black and white and grey. But I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country."

"The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth. So it has been an honour to serve it. I give my thanks to you, the British people, for the times that I have succeeded, and my apologies to you for the times I have fallen short. But good luck."

"The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out."

"The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified.""

"Some may belittle politics but we who are engaged in it know that it is where people stand tall. Although I know that it has many harsh contentions, it is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. If it is, on occasions, the place of low skulduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes. I wish everyone, friend or foe, well. That is that. The end."

"Analogies with the past are never properly accurate and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading, but in pure chronology I sometimes wonder if we're not in the 1920s or 1930s again... This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace."

"I think this has gone beyond, as it were, Al Qaida as a specific network. I mean, this is -- there is no central command in this ideology, the way that, you know, you would normally describe one unit of -- that leads and operation. It's not like that. But the fact is that they are loosely linked by an ideology. They have very strong links with each other, right across the national boundaries. And you know, would be no surprise to me if the people that were engaged in the Mumbai attacks had links with other countries as well."

"Brexit reminds me a bit of the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles where the sheriff, at one point during it, holds a gun to his own head and says: "If you don't do what I want I'll blow my brains out" - you want to watch that one of the 26 (other EU members) don't say just go ahead."

"We should engage with the new de facto power and help make the new government make the changes necessary, especially on the economy, so they can deliver for the people. The events that led to the Egyptian army's removal of President Mohamed Morsi confronted the military with a simple choice: intervention or chaos. Seventeen million people on the streets are not the same as an election. But it as an awesome manifestation of power. I am a strong supporter of democracy. But democratic government doesn't on its own mean effective government. Today efficacy is the challenge. This is a sort of free democratic spirit that operates outside the convention of democracy that elections decide the government. It is enormously fuelled by social media, itself a revolutionary phenomenon. And it moves very fast in precipitating crisis. It is not always consistent or rational. A protest is not a policy, or a placard a programme for government. But if governments don't have a clear argument with which to rebut the protest, they're in trouble."

"The battles of this century … are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology—like those of the 20th century—but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference."

"I pay tribute to the campaign [Jeremy Corbyn] ran, I think that he showed a lot of character in the way that he ran that campaign. He generated a lot of enthusiasm. I buy all of that. But I also think that it's important and salutary for us to remember this government is in a greater degree of mess than any government I can remember. Even in the 1990s the Tory government was a paragon of stability compared with this, and yet we're a couple of points ahead and I think I'm right that [Corbyn] is not yet ahead of her as Prime Minister. So I pay tribute to all of that, but I still say 'Come on guys, we should be 15, 20 points ahead."

"Torture, encouraged from above, became a fact of life [in occupied Iraq]. Perhaps some good liberal apologist for Blair will soon explain how democratic torture is much nicer than authoritarian torture."

"A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician, but without much substance; bereft of ideas he eagerly grasped and tried to improve upon the legacy of Margaret Thatcher."

"The trouble with Tony is that he always believes what he is saying when he is saying it."

"[Blair] is a lightweight. I don't like his political morals and how he's been enriching himself since leaving office. He preaches high moral language but … I have a visceral contempt for Blair. Not dislike. Just contempt."

"He was the future, once..."

"Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's failures are still writ large on the public imagination – the Iraq War for example, or the racking up of astonishing national debt. But what is less well recognised is the last Labour government’s extraordinary success in using seemingly mundane pieces of legislation to profoundly – and, for conservatives, detrimentally – transform the culture of the United Kingdom. In its 2005 manifesto, the Labour Party pledged to bring forward a new Equality Bill, to "modernise and simplify" equality laws. A bland aim perhaps, but the resulting Equality Act 2010 became a flagship piece of New Labour legislation that would embed leftist identity politics into our public institutions, paving the way for the ideological capture of our schools, civil service and NHS."

"Don’t be shameless, Mr Blair. Don’t be immoral, Mr. Blair. You are one of those who have no morals. You are not one who has the right to criticize anyone about the rules of the international community. You are an imperialist pawn who attempts to curry favor with Danger Bush-Hitler, the number one mass murderer and assassin there is on the planet. Go straight to hell, Mr. Blair."

"Like anyone else who knows anything about the Middle East, you just pray that this man will shut the fuck up."

"Tony Blair had his finger on the modernising pulse of Britain in the 90s, identifying the UK as a country that was increasingly progressive and outward-looking, and with little time for passing judgement on the basis of gender, race, sexuality or disability. And it was this analysis which caught the public mood and helped sweep Labour to its historic landslide victory on 1 May 1997. As a party with equality at its core, the new government was eager to get on with advancing the fairness agenda and building on the work done by pioneers such as Barbara Castle."

"The righteous will evidently never tire of the pelting and taunting of Tony Blair, and perhaps those like him who choose to join the Roman choir of extreme unctuousness must expect their meed of abuse. But I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history."

"In November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair had his only meeting with independent British experts. “We all pretty much said the same thing,” said George Joffe, a Middle East specialist from Cambridge University. “Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don’t imagine you’ll be welcomed.” Blair did not appear interested in this analysis and focused instead on Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” The experts tried to explain that thirty years of Hussein’s dictatorship had ground down Iraq’s civil society to the point that there were virtually no independent organized forces to serve as allies for the coalition. Blair remained uninterested. The Foreign Office showed no more interest in taking advantage of their considerable knowledge and expertise. A little more than five years later, in January 2008, the U.K. Ministry of Defence issued a report that was severely critical of the way in which British soldiers were prepared to serve in Iraq. There had been, the report said, a lack of information about the context the soldiers would be operating in and uncertainty about how the Iraqis might react to an invasion. The military, the report went on, failed to anticipate differences between Iraq and the Balkans and Northern Ireland where British forces had gained a great deal of their recent experience. In other words, they had not looked at the history of Iraq."

"Few talk or think about Iraq these days; the media ignores this important but demolished nation. Iraq, let us recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, and financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia... We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil being extracted by big US oil firms since 2003."

"Like millions of others, I now bitterly resent that a prime minister could use such a farrago of lies and manipulation to deceive us and to take the nation to war so dishonestly."

"Somebody who did it first and perhaps did it better than I will do. He has been an example for so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish."

"I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he even believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention — himself — has been his only interesting role."

"What can we do? We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government's excesses. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair-and their allies for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are."

"I view him as the kind of air guitarist of political rhetoric. I don't think he's debased political debate because he lies, I actually sadly think he believes a lot of what he says, that's what's so depressing about it, for people who stand outside of politics. So my rather bizarre viewpoint — should he go? — it feels like he left a long time ago, leaving this Tony Blair shaped hole that carries on talking.""

"Blair likes to say that his party is best when it is bold. So is he--and when he has an unconflicted view of the right and wrong of an issue... Blair is not at his best when his vision of what is right is blurred."

"Among the many challenges you faced with great courage, may I just mention two. You stayed close to our American ally in difficult times. And because of you we saw an end to the horrors of genocide in the Balkans."

"Tony Blair, a passionate Christian, has expressed his conviction that WMDs will be found in almost directly religious terms of credo quia absurdum: despite the lack of evidence, he personally is deeply convinced that they will be found. ... The only appropriate answer to this conundrum is not the boring liberal plea for innocence until guilt is proved but, rather, the point made succintly by 'Rachel from Scotland' on the BBC website in September 2003: 'We know he had weapons; we sold him some of them.' This is the direction a serious investigation should have taken."

"In the early days of his government, Tony Blair liked to paraphrase the famous joke from Monty Python's Life of Brian ('All right, but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?') in order ironically to disarm his critics: 'They betrayed socialism. True, they brought more social security, they did a lot for healthcare and education, and so on, but, in spite of all that, they betrayed socialism.' As it is clear today, it is, rather, the reverse which applies: 'We remain socialists. True, we practice Thatcherism in economics, we attack asylum-seekers, beggars and single mothers, we made a deal with Murdoch, and so on, but, none the less, we're still socialists.'"

"UK’s Prime Minister Tony Blair should hang with the U.S. gang, but who is calling for this? How much longer will the necessary prosecutions wait? Till after these international war-criminals have all gone honored to their graves? Although the International Criminal Court considered and dismissed possible criminal charges against Tony Blair’s UK Government regarding the invasion and military occupation of Iraq, the actual crime, of invading and militarily occupying a country which had posed no threat to the national security of the invader, was ignored, and the conclusion was that “the situation did not appear to meet the required threshold of the Statute” (which was only “Willful killing or inhuman treatment of civilians” and which ignored the real crime, which was “aggressive war” or “the crime of aggression” — the crime for which Nazis had been hanged at Nuremberg)... We... now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effective international law, at all."

"Life with a Jolly Parent is a bit like life in a holiday camp. The beds are too small and there's an outbreak of Salmonella every five minutes."

"Flash Teacher: How to spot: He'll be the only member of staff who drives a customized Lada."

"For a start, let's look at the Grotto itself. By and large these are extremely aptly named, 'Grot' meaning rubbish and 'Oh' being exclamation of disappointed surprise."

"There are two distinct types of bike: The one you save up for and buy yourself, otherwise known as the 'Dream Machine' , and the one your parents buy for you, otherwise known as the 'Complete waste of space'."

"It's easy to forget you are in debt to the tune of £10, and to a woman who never forgets anything. Crikey, she can even tell you which Coronation Street character was the first one to have their brain removed (Footnote: And not have it replaced by acting talent unfortunately.)"

"Fishing is a jerk at one end of a line waiting for a jerk at the other end of a line."

"The love affair between intellectuals and Marxism which is so characteristic of our age developed relatively late in western Europe, though in Russia itself it began in Marx's own lifetime."

"First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved."

"[H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential component of nationalism."

"Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed."

"Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle."

"Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners."

"As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports."

"Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential."

"Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words, which were invented or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as 'industry', 'industrialist', 'factory,' middle class,' 'working class,' and 'socialism.' They include 'aristocracy,' as well as 'railway,' 'liberal' and 'conservative' as political terms, 'nationality,' 'scientist,' and 'engineer,' 'proletariat,' and (economic) 'crisis'."

"It is not strictly accurate to call the ‘enlightenment’ a middle class ideology, though there were many enlighteners—and politically they were the decisive ones—who assumed as a matter of course that the free society would be a capitalist society. In theory its object was to set all human beings free. All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it, and indeed came out of it. Yet in practice the leaders of the emancipation for which the enlightenment called were likely to be the middle ranks of society, the new, rational men of ability and merit rather than birth, and the social order which would emerge from their activities would be a ‘bourgeois’ and capitalist one."

"The fundamental fact about Britain in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution was, that the comfortable and rich classes accumulated income so fast and in such vast quantities as to exceed all available possibilities of spending and investment."

"France provided the codes of law, the model of scientific and technical organization, the metric system of measurement for most countries. The ideology of the modern world first penetrated the ancient civilizations which had hitherto resisted European ideas through French influence. This was the work of the French Revolution."

"For the Napoleonic myth is based less on Napoleon’s merits than on the facts, then unique, of his career. The great known world-shakers of the past had begun as kings like Alexander or patricians like Julius Caesar; but Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose to rule a continent by sheer personal talent. (This was not strictly true, but his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young Bonaparte had done, wrote bad poems and novels, and adored Rousseau could henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be—the clichés themselves say so—a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilized man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams. For the French he was also something much simpler: the most successful ruler in their long history. He triumphed gloriously abroad; but at home he also established or re-established the apparatus of French institutions as they exist to this day. Admittedly most—perhaps all—his ideas were anticipated by Revolution and Directory; his personal contribution was to make them rather more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian. But his predecessors anticipated: he carried out. The great lucid monuments of French law, the Codes which became models for the entire non-Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world, were Napoleonic. The hierarchy of officials, from the prefects down, of courts, of university and schools, was his. The great ‘careers’ of French public life, army, civil service, education, law still have their Napoleonic shapes. He brought stability and prosperity to all except the quarter-of-a-million Frenchmen who did not return from his wars; and even to their relatives he brought glory. No doubt the British saw themselves fighting for liberty against tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible wage-labourers lost the substantial economic benefits of the Revolution. There is little mystery about the persistence of Bonapartism as an ideology of non-political Frenchmen, especially the richer peasantry, after his fall. It took a second and smaller Napoleon to dissipate it between 1851 and 1870. He had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country."

"In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages."

"The really frightening risk of war was neglect, filth, poor organization, defective medical services, and hygenic ignorance, which conditions (as in the troops) practically everybody."

"One provision of the international peace settlement must, however, be mentioned separately: the abolition of the international slave-trade. The reasons for this were both humanitarian and economic: slavery was horrifying, and extremely inefficient. Moreover, from the point of view of the British who were the chief international champions of this admirable movement among the powers, the economy of 1815–48 no longer rested, like that of the eighteenth century, on the sale of men and of sugar, but on that of cotton goods. The actual abolition of slavery came more slowly (except, of course, where the French Revolution had already swept it away)."

"Rarely has the incapacity of governments to hold up the course of history been more conclusively demonstrated than in the generation after 1815. To prevent a second French Revolution, or the even worse catastrophe of a general European revolution on the French model, was the supreme object of all the powers which had just spent more than twenty years in defeating the first; even of the British, who were not in sympathy with the reactionary absolutism which re-established themselves all over Europe and knew quite well that reforms neither could nor ought to be avoided, but who feared a new Franco-Jacobin expansion more than any other international contingency. And yet, never in European history and rarely anywhere else has revolutionarism been so endemic, so general, so likely to spread by spontaneous contagion as well as by deliberate propaganda."

"Nothing like nationalism is discoverable elsewhere, for the social conditions for it did not exist. In fact, if anything the forces which were later to produce nationalism were at this stage opposed to the alliance of tradition, religion and mass poverty which produced the most powerful resistance to the encroachment of western conquerors and exploiters."

"These three factors—the influence of the French Revolution, the rational economic argument of civil servants, and the greed of the nobility, determined the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia between 1807 and 1816."

"Of all the economic consequences of the age of dual revolution this division between the ‘advanced’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ countries proved to be the most profound and the most lasting."

"No groups of the population welcomed the opening of the career to talent to whatever kind more passionately than those minorities who had hitherto been debarred from eminence not merely because they were not well-born, but because they suffered official and collective discrimination."

"The alternative to escape or defeat was rebellion. And such was the situation of the labouring poor, and especially the industrial proletariat which became their nucleus, that rebellion was not merely possible, but virtually compulsory. Nothing was more inevitable in the first half of the nineteenth century than the appearance of labour and socialist movements, and indeed of mass social revolutionary unrest."

"For most of history and over most of the world (China being perhaps the main exception) the terms in which all but a handful of educated and emancipated men thought about the world were those of traditional religion, so much so that there are countries in which the word ‘Christian’ is simply a synonym for ‘peasant’ or even ‘man’."

"Religion, from being something like the sky, from which no man can escape and which contains all that is above the earth, became something like a bank of clouds, a large but limited and changing feature of the human firmament. Of all the ideological changes this is by far the most profound, though its practical consequences were more ambiguous and undetermined than was then supposed. At all events, it is the most unprecedented."

"Bourgeois triumph thus imbued the French Revolution with the agnostic or secular-moral ideology of the eighteenth century enlightenment, and since the idiom of that revolution became the general language of all subsequent social revolutionary movements, it transmitted this secularism..."

"Except perhaps for such irreducible sexual groups as parents and their children, the ‘man’ of classical liberalism (whose literary symbol was Robinson Crusoe) was a social animal only insofar as he co-existed in large numbers. Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. Happiness (a term which caused its definers almost as much trouble as its pursuers) was each individual’s supreme object; the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was plainly the aim of society."

"But even the arts of a small minority in society can still echo the thunder of the earthquakes which shake all humanity. The literature and arts of our period did so, and the result was ‘Romanticism’. As a style, a school, an era in the arts, nothing is harder to define or even to describe in terms of formal analysis; not even ‘classicism’ against which ‘romanticism’ claimed to raise the banner of revolt. The romantics themselves hardly help us, for though their own descriptions of what they were after were firm and decided, they were also often quite devoid of rational content."

"To draw a parallelism between the arts and the sciences is always dangerous, for the relationships between either and the society in which they flourish is quite different. Yet the sciences too in their way reflected the dual revolution, partly because it made specific new demands on them, partly because it opened new possibilities for them and faced them with new problems, partly because its very existence suggested new patterns of thought."

"The progress of science is not a simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of posing of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems."

"In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard 'the full sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under the kingdom in Europe to its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris. 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst."

"People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal."

"The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported. This relation between the ordinary peasant and the rebel, outlaw and robber is what makes social banditry interesting and significant."

"'Crocco' (Carmine Donatelli), A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side."

"Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is not as much their economic vulnerability - indeed they are as often as not virtually self sufficient - as their mobility."

"Still the dualism of the revolution of 1789 to 1848 gives the history of that period both unity and symmetry. It is in a sense easy to write and read about, because it appears to possess a clear theme and a clear shape, and its chronological limits are as clearly defined as we have any right to expect in human affairs."

"Above all, history – social and economic structure – and politics divided the revolutionary zone into two parts, whose extremes appeared to have little in common. Their social structure differed fundamentally, except for the substantial and pretty universal prevalence of countrymen over townsmen, of small towns over big cities; a fact easily overlooked, because the urban population and especially the large cities were disproportionately prominent in politics."

"The defenders of the social order had to learn the politics of the people. This was the major innovation brought about by the 1848 revolutions. Even the most arch-reactionary Prussian junkers discovered during that year that they required a newspaper capable of influencing ‘public opinion’ – in itself a concept linked with liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy."

"When we write the ‘world history’ of earlier periods, we are in fact making an addition of the histories of the various parts of the globe, but which, in so far as they had knowledge of one another, had only marginal and superficial contacts, unless the inhabitants of some region had conquered or colonized another, as the west Europeans did the Americas."

"We are today more familiar than the men of the mid-nineteenth century with this drawing together of all parts of the globe into a single world. Yet there is a substantial difference between the process as we experience it today and that in the period of this book. What is most striking about it in the later twentieth century is an international standardization which goes far beyond the purely economic and technological. In this respect our world is more massively standardized than Phileas Fogg’s, but only because there are more machines, productive installations and businesses."

"Increasingly, therefore, the formal international structure came to diverge from the real one. International politics became global politics, in which at least two non-European powers were to intervene effectively, though this was not evident until the twentieth century. Furthermore, it became a sort of oligopoly of capitalist-industrial powers, jointly exercising a monopoly over the world, but competing among themselves; though this did not become evident until the era of ‘imperialism’ after the end of our period."

"If nationalism was one historic force recognized by governments, ‘democracy’, or the growing role of the common man in the affairs of state, was the other. The two were the same, in so far as nationalist movements in this period became mass movements, and certainly at this point pretty well all radical nationalist leaders supposed them to be identical. However, as we have seen, in practice large bodies of common people, such as peasants, still remained unaffected by nationalism even in the countries in which their participation in politics was seriously considered, while others, notably the new working classes, were being urged to follow movements which, at least in theory, put a common international class interest above national affiliations."

"As capitalism and bourgeois society triumphed, the prospects of alternatives to it receded, in spite of the emergence of popular politics and labour movements. These prospects could hardly have seemed less promising in, say 1872–3. And yet within a very few years the future of the society that had triumphed so spectacularly once again seemed uncertain and obscure, and movements to replace it or to overthrow it had once again to be taken seriously. We must therefore consider these movements for radical social and political change as they existed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century."

"The era of liberal triumph began with a defeated revolution and ended in a prolonged depression. The first forms a more convenient signpost for marking the beginning or end of a historical period than the second, but history does not consult the convenience of historians, though some of them are not always aware of it."

"Where historians try to come to grips with a period which has left surviving eyewitnesses, two quite different concepts of history clash, or, in the best of cases, supplement each other: the scholarly and the existential, archive and personal memory. For everyone is a historian of his or her own consciously lived lifetime inasmuch as he or she comes to terms with it in the mind – an unreliable historian from most points of view, as anyone knows who has ventured into ‘oral history’, but one whose contribution is essential. Scholars who interview old soldiers or politicians will have already acquired more, and more reliable, information about what happened from print and paper, than their source has in his or her memory, but may nevertheless misunderstand it. And, unlike, say, the historian of the crusades, the historian of the Second World War can be corrected by those who, remembering, shake their head and tell him or her: ‘But it was not like that at all.’ Nevertheless, both the versions of history which thus confront one another are, in different senses, coherent constructions of the past, consciously held as such and at least potentially capable of definition."

"Most observers in the 1870s would have been far more impressed by its linearity. In material terms, in terms of knowledge and the capacity to transform nature it seemed so patent that change meant advance that history – at all events modern history – seemed to equal progress. Progress was measured by the ever rising curve of whatever could be measured, or what men chose to measure. Continuous improvement, even of those things which clearly still required it, was guaranteed by historical experience. It seemed hardly credible that little more than three centuries ago intelligent Europeans had regarded the agriculture, military techniques and even the medicine of the ancient Romans as the model for their own, that a bare two centuries ago there could be a serious debate about whether the moderns could ever surpass the achievement of the ancients, and that at the end of the eighteenth century experts could have doubted whether the population of Britain was increasing."

"A world economy whose pace was set by its developed or developing capitalist core was extremely likely to turn into a world in which the ‘advanced’ dominated the ‘backward’; in short into a world of empire. But, paradoxically, the era from 1875 to 1914 may be called the Age of Empire not only because it developed a new kind of imperialism, but also for a much more old-fashioned reason. It was probably the period of modern world history in which the number of rulers officially calling themselves, or regarded by western diplomats as deserving the title of, ‘emperors’ was at its maximum."

"[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so."

"Nevertheless it is evident — if only from the Greek example just cited — that proto-nationalism, where it existed, made the task of nationalism easier, however great the differences between the two, insofar as existing symbols and sentiments of proto-national community could he mobilized behind a modern cause or a modern state. But this is far from saying that the two were the same, or even that one must logically or inevitably lead into the other. For it is evident that proto-nationalism alone is clearly not enough to form nationalities, nations, let alone states."

"However, mass expulsion and even genocide began to make their appearance on the southern margins of Europe during and after World War I, as the Turks set about the mass extirpation of the Armenians in 1915 and, after the Greco Turkish war of 1911, expelled between 1.3 and 1.5 millions of Greeks from Asia Minor, where they had lived since the days of Homer. Subsequently Adolph Hitler, who was in this respect a logical Wilsonian nationalist, arranged to transfer Germans not living on the territory of the fatherland, such as those of Italian South Tyrol, to Germany itself, as he also arranged for the permanent elimination of the Jews."

"My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together. For anyone of my age-group who has lived through all or most of the Short Twentieth Century this is inevitably also a autobiographical endeavor. We are talking about, amplifying (and correcting) our own memories. And we are talking as men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways,in its history as actors in its dramas - however insignificant our parts - as observers of our times and, not least, as people whose views of the century have been formed by what we have come to see as its crucial events."

"The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century."

"The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980's was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917."

"In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler."

"Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production."

"The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative."

"Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed,sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."

"The best approach to this cultural revolution is therefore through family and household, i.e. through the structure of relations between the secondhand generations. In most societies this had been impressively resistant to sudden change, though this does not mean that such structures were static."

"The cultural revolution of the later twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures. For such textures had consisted not only of the actual relations between human beings and their forms of organization but also of the general models of such relations and the texted patterns of people's behaviour towards each other; their roles were prescribed, though not always written. Hence the often traumatic insecurity when older conventions of behaviour were either overturned or lost their rationale, or the incomprehension between those who felt this loss and those too young to have known anything but anomic society."

"The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards, and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply expressions of individuals' preferences, and claims that the law should recognize the supremacy of these preferences. Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless."

"The tragedy of the October revolution was precisely that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal, command socialism."

"As I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate , brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the Five-Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find a answer."

"Communism as an ideology had been passionately committed to women's equality and liberation, in every sense including the erotic, in spite of Lenin's own dislike of casual sexual promiscuity. (However, both Krupskaya and Lenin were among the rare revolutionaries who specifically favored the sharing of housework between the sexes)...Yet, with rather rare exceptions...they were not prominent in the first political ranks of their parties, or indeed at all, and in the new communist-governed states they became even less visible. Indeed, women in leading political functions virtually disappeared...When women streamed into a profession opened to them, as in the U.S.S.R., where the medical profession became largely feminized in consequence, it lost status and income. As against Western feminists, most married Soviet women, long used to a lifetime of paid work, dreamed of the luxury of staying at home and doing only one job...whatever the achievements and failures of the socialist world, it did not generate specifically feminist movements,and could indeed hardly have done so, given the virtual impossibility of any political initiatives not sponsored by state and party before the mid-1980s"

"The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity."

"Surrealism was a genuine addition to the repertoire of avant-garde arts, its novelty attested by the ability to produce shock, incomprehension, or what amounted to the same thing, a sometimes, embarrassed laughter, even among the older avant-garde."

"The art most significantly affected by radio was music, since it was abolished the acoustic or mechanical limitations on the range of sounds. Music, the last of the arts to break out of the bodily prison that confines oral communication, had already entered the era of mechanical production before 1914 with the gramophone, although this was hardly yet within reach of the masses"

"It was the tragedy of modernist artists, Left or Right, that the much more effective political commitment of their own mass movements and politicians - not to mention their adversaries - rejected them. With the partial exception of Futurist-influenced Italian fascism, the new authoritarian regimes of both Right and Left preferred old-fashioned and gigantic monumental buildings and vistas in architecture, inspirational representations in both painting and sculpture, elaborate performances of the classics on stage, and ideological acceptability in literature."

"These and many other attempts to replace history by myth and invention are not merely bad intellectual jokes. After all, they can determine what goes into schoolbooks, as the Japanese authorities knew, when they insisted on a sanitized version of the Japanese war in China for use in Japanese classrooms. Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity by which groups of people today, defining themselves by ethnicity, religion or the past or present borders of states, try to find some certainty in an uncertain and shaking world by saying, 'We are different from and better than the Others.'"

"The past is therefore a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values and other patterns of human society. The problem for historians is to analyse the nature of this 'sense of the past' in society and to trace its changes and transformations."

"It is easier to formulate questions than answers, and this paper has taken the easier way rather than the more difficult. And yet, perhaps to ask questions, especially about the experiences we tend to take for granted, is not a valueless occupation. We swim in the past as fish do in water, and cannot escape from it. But our modes of living and moving in this medium require analysis and discussion. My object has been to stimulate both."

"For where we stand in regard to the past, what the relations are between past, present and future are not only matters of vital interest to all: they are quite indispensable. We cannot help situating ourselves in the continuum of our own life, of the family and group to which we belong. We cannot help comparing past and present: that is what family photo albums or home movies are there for. We cannot help learning from it, for that is what experience means. We may learn the wrong things - and plainly we often do - but if we don't learn, or have had no chance of learning, or refuse to learn from whatever past is relevant for our purpose, we are, in the extreme case, mentally abnormal."

"History as inspiration and ideology has a built-in tendency to become self-justifying myth. Nothing is a more dangerous blindfold than this, as the history of modern nations and nationalisms demonstrates."

"Let me put it in paradoxical form. It is equally unhelpful to dismiss Marx because we dislike his demonstration that capitalism and bourgeois society are temporary historical phenomena, and to embrace him simply because we are for socialism, which he thought would succeed them. I believe Marx discerned some basic tendencies with profound insight; but we do not know actually what they will bring. Like so much of the future predicted in the past, when it comes it may be unrecognizable, not because the predictions were wrong but because we were wrong to put a particular face and costume to the interesting stranger whose arrival we were told to expect."

"So let me conclude. History has made progress this century, in a lumbering and zig-zag manner, but genuine progress. In saying this I am implying that it belongs to the disciplines to which the word 'progress' can properly apply, that it is possible to arrive at a better understanding of a process which is objective and real, namely the complex, contradictory, but not adventitious, historical development of human societies in the world. I know that there are people who deny this."

"The history of society is still being constructed. I have in this essay tried to suggest some of its problems, to assess some of its practice, and incidentally to hint at certain problems which might benefit from more concentrated exploration. But it would be wrong to conclude without noting, and welcoming, the remarkably flourishing state of the field. It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it today."

"History, whose subject is the past, is not in a position to be an applied discipline in this sense, if only because no way has yet been discovered to change what has already happened. At most we can make counterfactual speculations about hypothetical alternatives. Of course past, present and future are part of one continuum, and what historians have to say could therefore permit both forecasts and recommendations for the future."

"My argument implies that, divorced from history, economics is a rudderless ship and economists without history have not much idea of where it is sailing to. But I am not suggesting that these defects can be remedied simply be getting some charts, that is by paying more attention to concrete economic realities and historical experience. As a matter of fact, there have always been plenty of economists ready and anxious to keep their eyes open. The trouble is that, if in the mainstream tradition, their theory and method as such has not helped them to know where to look and what to look for."

"If economics is not to remain the victim of history, constantly attempting to apply its tool-kit, generally with a time-lag, to yesterday's developments which have become sufficiently visible to dominate the scene today, it must develop or rediscover this historical perspective. For this may have a bearing not only on tomorrow's problems, about which we ought, if possible, to think before we get swamped by them, but also on tomorrow's theory."

"Economists might conceivably agree on the value of history for their discipline, but not historians about the value of economics for theirs. This is partly because history covers a much wider field. As we have seen, it is an obvious drawback of economics as a subject dealing with the real world that it selects out some and only some aspects of human behaviour as 'economic' and leaves the rest to someone else."

"From the historians' point of view these assumptions must be realistic or they are junk. If we use the assumption of perfect foresight by businessmen to construct data, the question of its empirical validity is crucial. Altering the assumptions, whether about the model or about the data, can make a substantial difference to both the data and the answers."

"In analysing both agricultural change and economic growth in general, non-economic factors cannot be divorced from economic ones - certainly not in the short run. To separate them is to abandon the historical, that is the dynamic, analysis of the economy."

"In short, for everyone engaged in scientific discourse, statements must be subject to validation by methods and criteria which are, in principle, not subject to partisanship, whatever their ideological consequences, and however motivated. Statements not subject to such validation may nevertheless be important and valuable, but belong to a different order of discourse. They pose extremely interesting and difficult philosophical problems, especially when they are clearly in some sense descriptive (for example, in representative art or criticism 'about' some specific creative work or artist), but cannot be considered here. Nor can we here consider statements of the logico-mathematical type, insofar as they are not (as in theoretical physics) linked to validation by evidence."

"Having established the limits beyond which partisanship ceases to be scientifically legitimate, let me argue the case in favour of legitimate partisanship, both from the point of view of the scientific or scholarly discipline and from that of the cause to which the scholar feels committed."

"It is in this situation that political partisanship can serve to counteract the increasing tendency to look inwards, in extreme instances the scholiasm, the tendency to develop intellectual ingenuity for its own sake, the self-insulation of the academy. It may indeed fall victim to the same dangers itself, if a sufficiently large 'field' of a self-insulated partisan scholarship develops."

"The fundamental question in history implies the discovery of a mechanism for both the differentiation of various human social groups and the transformation of one kind of society into another, or the failure to do so. In certain respects, which Marxists and common sense regard as crucial, such as the control of man over nature, it certainly implies unidirectional change or progress, at least over a sufficiently long time-span. So long as we do not suppose that the mechanisms of such social development are the same as or similar to those of biological evolution, there seems to be no good reason for not using the term 'evolution' for it."

"In short, the analysis of modes of production must be based on study of the available material forces of production: study, that is, both of technology and its organization, and of economics. For let us not forget that in the same Preface whose later passage is so often quoted, Marx argued that political economy was the anatomy of civil society. Nevertheless, in one respect the traditional analysis of mops and their transformation must be developed - and recent Marxist work has, in fact, done so. The actual transformation of one mode into another has often been seen in causal and unilinear terms: within each mode, it is argued, there is a 'basic contradiction' which generates the dynamic and the forces that will lead to its transformation. It is far from clear that this is Marx's own view - except for capitalism - and it certainly leads to great difficulties and endless debates, particularly in connection with the passage from Western feudalism to capitalism."

"The major strength of Wolf's book - his concentration on interaction, intermingling and mutual modification - is at the same time its major weakness, since it tends to take for granted the nature of the dynamism which has brought the world from pre-history to the late twentieth century. This is a book about connections rather than causes. Or rather, the author has re-thought the problems of the genesis and development of capitalism less fundamentally than those of the interconnections essential to it."

"Much less useful, I think however, is the search for deep structures and particularly the search for la conscience. I may be entirely heterodox, but I don't think historians have an awful lot to learn from Freud, who was a bad historian, whenever he actually wrote anything about history. I have no opinions about Freud's psychology, but I regard the belated discovery of Freud in France some forty years after the rest of the world as by no means an unqualified plus. It seems to me it is a minus, insofar as it diverts attention into the unconscious or deep structures from, I won't say conscious, but anyway logical cohesion. It neglects system. It seems to me the problem of mentalities is not simply that of discovering that people are different, and how they are different, and making readers feel the difference, as Richard Cobb does so well. It is to find a logical connection between various forms of behaviour, of thinking and feeling, to see them as being mutually consistent. It is, if you like, to see why it makes sense, let us say, for people to believe about famous robbers that they are invisible and invulnerable, even though they obviously are not. We must see such beliefs not purely as an emotional reaction but as part of a coherent system of beliefs about society, about the role of those who believe, and the role of those about whom the beliefs are held."

"I think the programme, for the history of mentalities, is not so much discovery as analysis. What I would like to do is not simply, like Edward Thompson, to save the stockinger and the peasant, but also the nobleman and the king of the past, from the condescension of modern historians who think they know better, who think they know what is logical and theoretical argument."

"Clearly some historians have shifted from 'circumstances' to 'men' (including women), or have discovered that a simple base-superstructure model and economic history are not enough, or - since the pay-off from such approaches has been very substantial - are no longer enough. Some may well have convinced themselves that there is an incompatibility between their 'scientific' and 'literary' functions. But it is not necessary to analyse the present fashions in history entirely as a rejection of the past, and insofar as they cannot be entirely analysed in such terms, it will not do."

"Let us, however, spare a final thought for those whose strange 'lived reality' is evoked successfully by Price's technique: the Moravians. They came to the benighted heathen in conditions which often seemed 'a foretaste of what hell must be like'. Unprepared for the forest, inexperienced, they suffered and died like flies - honest, uncomprehending German tailors, shoemakers or linen weavers in unsuitable European costumes, who could be expected to last a few months or weeks, preaching Jesus the Crucified with Blood and Wounds, among the scorpions and jaguars, before contentedly going home to Him. They were entirely dependent on the maroons, who did not like them as whites, made fun of them and occasionally persecuted them. They played music, and were uncomfortable when the blacks danced to it. They failed in all their endeavours except the heroic task of compiling Brother Schumann's Saramaka-German dictionary in nine pain-wracked months. Their successors are still there and still the Saramakas' only road to reading and writing."

"Grassroots historians spend much of their time finding out how societies work and when they do not work, as well as how they change. They cannot help doing this, since their subject, ordinary people, make up the bulk of any society. They start out with the enormous advantage of knowing that they are largely ignorant of either the facts or the answers to their problems. They also have the substantial advantage of historians over social scientists who turn to history, of knowing how little we know of the past, how important it is to find out, and what hard work in a specialized discipline is needed for the purpose. They also have a third advantage. They know that what people wanted and needed was not always what their betters, or those who were cleverer and more influential, thought they ought to have. These are modest enough claims for our trade. But modesty is not a negligible virtue. It is important to remind ourselves from time to time that we don't know all the answers about society and that the process of discovering them is not simple. Those who plan and manage society now are perhaps unlikely to listen. Those who want to change society and eventually to plan its development ought also to listen. If some of them will, it will be due partly to the work of historians like George Rude."

"'Europe' had been on the defensive for a millennium. Now, for half a millennium, it conquered the world. Both observations make it impossible to sever European history from world history."

"There is no historically homogeneous Europe, and those who look for it are on the wrong track. However we define 'Europe', its diversity, the rise and fall, the coexistence, the dialectical interaction of its components, is fundamental to its existence. Without it, it is impossible to understand and explain the developments which led to the creation and control of the modern world by processes which came to maturity in Europe and nowhere else."

"There are cases - perhaps mine is among them - where this discovery can be particularly helpful. Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution. But there is nothing which can sharpen the historian's mind like defeat."

"The Russian Revolution really has two interwoven histories: its impact on Russia and its impact on the world. We must not confuse the two. Without the second, few except a handful of specialist historians would ever have been concerned with it. Outside the USA not many people know more about the American Civil War than that it is the setting of Gone with the Wind. And yet it was both the greatest war between 1815 and 1914 and by far the greatest in American history, and can also claim to have been something like a second American revolution. It meant and means much inside the USA but very little outside, for it had very little obvious effect on what happened in other countries, other than those beyond its southern borders. On the other hand, both in Russian history and in twentieth-century world history the Russian Revolution is a towering phenomenon - but not the same kind of phenomenon. What has it meant for the Russian peoples? It brought Russia to the peak of its international power and prestige - far beyond anything achieved under the Tsars. Stalin is as certain of a major permanent place in Russian history as Peter the Great. It modernized much of a backward country, but although its achievements were titanic - not least the ability to defeat Germany in the Second World War - their human cost was enormous, its dead-end economy was destined to run down and its political system broke down. Admittedly, for most of its inhabitants who can remember, the old Soviet era certainly looks far better than what the former Soviet peoples are going through now, and will go on doing so for a good long while. But it is too early to draw up a historical balance-sheet."

"Under these circumstances of social and political disintegration, we should expect a decline in civility in any case, and a growth in barbarism. And yet what has made things worse, what will undoubtedly make them worse in future, is that steady dismantling of the defences which the civilization of the Enlightenment had erected against barbarism, and which I have tried to sketch in this lecture. For the worst of it is that we have got used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable. Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money."

"In short, on the questions with which historical research and theoretical reaction can deal, there was and could be no difference in substance between scholars for whom the identity problems of Civitella were insignificant or uninteresting and a historian for whom they were existentially central. All historians present hoped to agree about the formulation of the questions about the Nazi atrocities, though one would not necessarily expect them to agree about them. All agreed about the procedures for answering these questions, the nature of the possible evidence which would allow them to be answered - insofar as the answers depended on evidence - and about the comparability of events which were experienced by the participants as unique and incommunicable. Conversely, those who were unwilling to submit their, or their community's, experience to these procedures, or who refused to accept the results of such tests, were outside the discipline of history, however much historians respected their motives and feelings. In fact, among the historians present there was an impressive consensus on matters of substance. It contrasted strikingly with the chaos of varied and conflicting emotions which agitated the participants."

"The internal and external pressures to do so may be great. Our passions and interests may urge us in this direction. Every Jew, for instance, whatever his or her occupation, instinctively accepts the force of the question with which, during many threatening centuries, members of our minority community confronted any and every event in the wider world: Is it good for the Jews? Is it bad for the Jews?' In times of discrimination or persecution it provided guidance - though not necessarily the best guidance - for private and public behaviour, a strategy at all levels for a scattered people. Yet it cannot and should not guide a Jewish historian, even one who writes the history of his own people. Historians, however microcosmic, must be for universalism, not out of loyalty to an ideal to which many of us remain attached but because it is the necessary condition for understanding the history of humanity, including that of any special section of humanity. For all human collectivities necessarily are and have been part of a larger and more complex world. A history which is designed only for Jews (or African-Americans, or Greeks, or women, or proletarians, or homosexuals) cannot be good history, though it may be comforting history to those who practise it."

"Nothing is easier than to see the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount as 'the first socialist' or communist, and though the majority of early socialist theorists were not Christians, many later members of socialists movements have found this reflection useful."

"Unlike the word 'communist', which always signified a programme, the word 'socialist' was primarily analytical and critical."

"Marx's ideas became the doctrines inspiring the labour and socialist movements of most of Europe. Mainly via Lenin and the Russian Revolution they became the quintessential international doctrine of twentieth-century social revolution, equally welcomes as such from China to Peru. Through the triumph of parties identified with these doctrines, versions of these ideas became the official ideology of the states in which, at their peak, something like a third of the human race lived, not to mention political movements of varying size an importance in the rest of the world. The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none have triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity. No secular thinker can be named beside him in this respect."

"Presented as a pendant to Age of Extremes, a personal portrait hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Hobsbawm’s vision of the twentieth century, and overall narrative of modernity? In overarching conception, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes can be regarded as single enterprise – a tetralogy which has no equal as a systematic account of how the contemporary world was made. All display the same astonishing fusion of gifts: economy of synthesis; vividness of detail; global scope, yet acute sense of regional difference; polymathic fluency, at ease with crops and stock markets, nations and classes, statesmen and peasants, sciences and arts; breadth of sympathies for disparate social agents; power of analytic narrative; and not least a style of remarkable clarity and energy, whose signature is the sudden bolt of metaphoric electricity across the even surface of cool, pungent argument."

"In a comparative European perspective, these workers carrying national flags seem exotic and are poorly understood. Well-known treatments, even of authors from Central Europe—like Ernst Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm—whittle down the specificity of the region’s nationalism beyond recognition as they shave off edges to fit it into a global definition of the term. Hobsbawm’s idea of the nation was to apply to every corner of the earth, but in this book, we have paid attention to what people in one corner meant by this word. In that corner, the coordinates of the global story as told in Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism are either irrelevant or secondary: for example, John Stuart Mills’s idea that a national state had to be “feasible,” or that nationalism required a particular threshold of size before it could be properly launched. Czechs or Slovenes knew nothing of such parameters and made their history without and against them. Hobsbawm’s idea that language and history were not decisive criteria would have struck virtually everyone in East Central Europe as nonsensical—though it may well apply to the phenomenon of nationalism as observed from a satellite high above the earth."

"Eric Hobsbawm might complain that I have been unfair: that my real gripe is that I wish that he had written another, different book. He might say that I want a Book Written for the Ages, that reflects what historians in future centuries will find of greatest interest. And he is right, I do. By contrast, he might say, his book is "written by a twentieth-century writer for late-twentieth-century readers," to whom "the history of the confrontation between capitalism' andsocialism'...[s]ocial revolutions, the Cold War, the nature, limits, and fatal flaws of `really existing socialism' and its breakdown" are worth discussing at length. He is writing for readers who take the central theme of twentieth century history to be the tragical-heroic course of World Communism. But the tragical-heroic course of World Communism is simply not the central theme of twentieth century history. For what audience is Hobsbawm writing his book? To what "late twentieth century readers" can we recommend The Age of Extremes as covering the pieces of twentieth century history they want and need to learn?"

"In 1968 I was a member of an attentive and admiring student audience whom Eric Hobsbawm was addressing on the theme, as I recall, of the limits of student radicalism. I remember very well his conclusion, since it ran so counter to the mood of the hour. Sometimes, he reminded us, the point is not to change the world but to interpret it. But in order to interpret the world one has also to have a certain empathy with the ways in which it has changed. His latest book is a challenging, often brilliant, and always cool and intelligent account of the world we have now inherited. If it is not up to his very best work it should be recalled just how demanding a standard he has set. But there are one or two crucial changes that have taken place in the world—the death of Communism, for instance, or the related loss of faith in history and the therapeutic functions of the state about which the author is not always well pleased. That is a pity, since it shapes and sometimes misshapes his account in ways that may lessen its impact upon those who most need to read and learn from it. And I missed, in his version of the twentieth century, the ruthlessly questioning eye which has made him so indispensable a guide to the nineteenth. In a striking apologia pro vita sua, Eric Hobsbawm reminds us that historians are “the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget.” It is a demanding and unforgiving injunction."

"Hobsbawm closes his memoirs with a rousing coda: “Let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.” He is right, on every count. But to do any good in the new century we must start by telling the truth about the old. Hobsbawm refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by its name; he never engages the moral as well as the political heritage of Stalin and his works. If he seriously wishes to pass a radical baton to future generations, this is no way to proceed."

"Hobsbawm was, as he said in The Age of Empire, writing out ‘the unfolding of an argument’, and that argument takes as given that, when it comes to historical significance, economics matters more than culture, men more than women, the West more than the Rest. His omissions were constitutive, not lapses. Redoing Hobsbawm, in other words, would involve taking on those core assumptions."

"Hobsbawm, was once asked how he justified living, ostentatiously well-off, in a Hampstead mansion. If one's sailing on the Titanic, he replied, one might as well go under the waves in first class. Witty, yes. But what if all the icebergs melted in 1989?"

"The chief problem for all of Hobsbawm’s history was that his primary aim was to verify the theories of Karl Marx. Despite claims by his obituary writers that he was never a slave to Marxist doctrine, or that his work was "always nuanced" and "elegant", the opposite was true."

"Our ultimate task is to find interpretative procedures that will uncover each bias and discredit its claims to universality. When this is done the eighteenth century can be formally closed and a new era that has been here a long time can be officially recognised. The individual human being, stripped of his humanity, is of no use as a conceptual base from which to make a picture of human society. No human exists except steeped in the culture of his time and place. The falsely abstracted individual has been sadly misleading to Western political thought. But now we can start again at a point where major streams of thought converge, at the other end, at the making of culture. Cultural analysis sees the whole tapestry as a whole, the picture and the weaving process, before attending to the individual threads."

"Who would have believed it probable or possible, before these discoveries were made, that beneath the heap of earth and rubbish which marked the site of Nineveh, there would be found the history of the wars between Hezekiah and Sennacherib, written at the very time when they took place by Sennacherib himself, and confirming even in minute details the Biblical record?"

"I have always believed that successes would be the inevitable result if the two services, the army and the navy, had fair play, and if we sent the right man to fill the right place."

"The impulse to understand, and not merely to know and to act, is an impulse characteristic of man and apparently not shared by other animals. I am not concerned here with the origin and nature of this impulse, but with its implications that there is something to be understood and that understanding is not reducible to knowledge and action."

"The systematic principle is based upon the hypothesis that there is a structure in the real world that transcends the distinctions of subjective and objective experience."

"True sensitivity is the beginning of what Gurdjieff calls Objective Reason and which he says, cannot be in this body and can only belong to the Second, or Kesdjanian Body, and when it is formed it can begin to acquire this direct perception of how things are, combined with experience that gives this vision a practical and realistic application. Out of this comes what he calls Objective Reason"

"G. I. Gurdjieff's sexual life was strange in its unpredictability. At certain times he led a strict, almost ascetic life, having no relation with women at all. At other times, his sex life seemed to go wild and it must be said that his unbridled periods were more frequent than the ascetic. At times, he had sexual relationships not only with almost any woman who happened to come within the sphere of his influence, but also with his own pupils. Quite a number of his women pupils bore him children and some of them remained closely connected with him all their lives. Others were just as close to him, as far as one could tell, without a sexual relationship."

"I must warn you that Gurdjieff is far more of an enigma than you can imagine. I am certain that he is deeply good, and that he is working for the good of mankind. But his methods are often incomprehensible. For example, he uses disgusting language, especially to ladies who are likely to be squeamish about such things. He has the reputation of behaving shamelessly over money matters, and with women also. At his table we have to drink spirits, often to the point of drunkenness. People have said that he is a magician, and that he uses his powers for his own ends... I do not believe that the scandalous tales told of Gurdjieff are true: but you must take into account that they may be true and act accordingly."

"Since we tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions, which are invisible to others, while we see others mainly in the light of their actions, which are visible to us, we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of the day"

"Ouspensky records a conversation in St. Petersburg during the summer of 1916 in which Gurdjieff discussed the problem of communication, and the impossibility of conveying in our ordinary language ideas which are intelligible and obvious only for a higher state of consciousness. Speaking of the unity between man, the Universe, and God, he said that the objective knowledge by which alone this unity is to be understood can never be expressed in words or logical forms. At this point, Gurdjieff made a statement which is a key to the understanding of his own subsequent writings. He said: Realising the imperfection and weakness of ordinary language, the people who have possessed objective knowledge have tried to express the idea of unity in ‘myths,’ in ‘symbols,’ and in particular ‘verbal formulas,’ which, having been transmitted without alteration, have carried on the idea from one school to another, often from one epoch to another. In All and Everything Gurdjieff makes extensive use of these three forms, that is, symbol, myth, and verbal formula...."

"There is no need in these mathematical days to defend the use of symbolism. It is regarded by many schools of modern thought as the only safe form of language. Wittgenstein treats symbols as something more than conventional signs, and regards them as corresponding in some way to the reality to which they refer. He would probably accept Gurdjieff’s dictum that: Symbols not only transmit knowledge but show the way to it. Even though other thinkers deny any objective reference to symbols, no one questions that symbolism has a power beyond that of ordinary language. It is different with the language of myth. This is despised by superficial thinkers, but the greatest philosophers have known its value."

"Gurdjieff said, “Change depends on you, and it will not come about through study. You can know everything and yet remain where you are. It is like a man who knows all about money and the laws of banking, but has no money of his own in the bank. What does all his knowledge do for him?” Here Gurdjieff suddenly changed his manner of speaking, and looking at me very directly he said: “You have the possibility of changing, but I must warn you that it will not be easy. You are still full of the idea that you can do what you like. In spite of all your study of free will and determinism, you have not yet understood that so long as you remain in this place, you can do nothing at all. Within this sphere there is no freedom. Neither your knowledge nor all your activity will give you freedom. This is because you have no …” Gurdjieff found it difficult to express what he wanted in Turkish. He used the word varlik, which means roughly the quality of being present. I thought he was referring to the experience of being separated from one’s body. Neither I nor the Prince [Sabaheddin] could understand what Gurdjieff wished to convey. I felt sad, because his manner of speaking left me in no doubt that he was telling me something of great importance. I answered, rather lamely, that I knew that knowledge was not enough, but what else was there to do but study?..."

"Every evening after dinner, a new life began. There was no hurry. Some walked in the garden. Others smoked. About nine o’clock we made our way alone or in twos and threes to the Study House. Outdoor shoes came off and soft shoes or moccasins were put on. We sat quietly, each on his or her own cushion, round the floor in the centre. Men sat on the right, women on the left; never together. Some went straight on to the stage and began to practice the rhythmic exercises. On our first arrival, each of us had the right to choose his own teacher for the movements. I had chosen Vasili Ferapontoff, a young Russian, tall, with a sad studious face. He wore pince-nez, and looked the picture of the perpetual student, Trofimov, in The Cherry Orchard. He was a conscientious instructor, though not a brilliant performer. I came to value his friendship, which continued until his premature death ten years later. He told me in one of our first conversations that he expected to die young. The exercises were much the same as those I had seen in Constantinople three years before. The new pupils, such as myself, began with the series called Six Obligatory Exercises. I found them immensely exciting, and worked hard to master them quickly so that I could join in the work of the general class."

"We do not know structures, but we know because of structures."

"Facts, that are no more than facts, are atomic and unrelated except by general laws. That is how the world was studied until the middle of the present century."

"Structure is a primary element of experience and not something that is added by the mind. In this respect, it can be said that the techniques of understanding call for a drastic revision of the usual modes of thought that treat being and understanding as independent or at least as separable from one another."

"John Godolphin Bennett was a skilled player of the game, one who kept his mind open and was always ready to experiment. He had charisma. He had personal power. He had a way with people, especially young people. I had debated at length with myself and others whether his influence on his students had been beneficial or disastrous. No answer came. It was perhaps too early to tell. In any case, he was dead. One more link in the old chain was destroyed. Soon that particular chain would vanish entirely."

"John G. Bennett was a distinguished scientist, mathematician and linguist. In the course of his researches and travels all over the world, Bennett made contact with many remarkable men. He devoted his life to the study, practice and teaching of the theory and techniques for the development of the latent powers of man: the widening of the intellect, the discipline of the body, and the steadying of the emotions."

"John G. Bennett was a research scientist who discovered more efficient methods for burning coal, thereby enhancing productivity and reducing pollution. He also was an intellectual who in the four-volume The Dramatic Universe formulated a "cosmic context" for integrating the discussion of environmental ethics."

"The present generation of Christian believers has had what is called the moral aspect of Christianity so constantly impressed upon them, and the essential and doctrinal aspect so slurred over, that many of them have come to accept the moral teaching associated with Christianity as its most important aspect ... To this type of believer it will come with something of a shock to be told quite plainly and without either circumlocution or apology that his religion is of an intensely selfish and egoistic character, and that its ethical influence is of a kind that is far from admirable. It will shock him because he has for so long been told that his religion is the very quintessence of unselfishness, he has for so long been telling it to others, and he has been able for so many generations to make it uncomfortable for all those who took an opposite view, that he has camouflaged both the nature of his own motives and the tendency of his religion ... That many Christians have given up the prizes of the world is too plain to be denied; that they have forsaken all that many struggle to possess is also plain. But when this has been admitted there still remains the truth that there is a vital distinction in the consideration of whether a man gives up the world in order to save his own soul, or whether he saves his soul as a consequence of losing the world. In this matter it is the aim that is important, not only to the outsider who may be passing judgment, but more importantly to the agent himself. It is the effect of the motive on character with its subsequent flowering in social life that must be considered. The first count in the indictment here is that the Christian appeal is essentially a selfish one. The aim is not the saving of others but of one's self. If other people must be saved it is because their salvation is believed to be essential to the saving of one's own soul."

"So far as Christianity is concerned it would puzzle the most zealous of its defenders to indicate a single direction in which it did anything to encourage the slightest modification of the spirit of intolerance. Mohammedans can at least point to a time when, while their religion was dominant, a considerable amount of religious freedom was allowed to those living under its control. In the palmy days of the Mohammedan rule in Spain both Jews and Christians were allowed to practise their religion with only trifling inconveniences, certainly without being exposed to the fiendish punishments that characterized Christianity all over the world. Moreover, it must never be overlooked that in Europe all laws against heresy are of Christian origin. In the old Roman Empire liberty of worship was universal. So long as the State religion was treated with a moderate amount of respect one might worship whatever god one pleased, and the number was sufficient to provide for the most varied tastes. When Christians were proceeded against it was under laws that did not aim primarily to shackle liberty of worship or of opinion. The procedure was in every case formal, the trial public, time was given for the preparation of the defence, and many of the judges showed their dislike to the prosecutions. But with the Christians, instead of persecution being spasmodic it was persistent. It was not taken up by the authorities with reluctance, but with eagerness, and it was counted as the most sacred of duties."

"Atheist is really ʺa thoroughly honest, unambiguous term,ʺ it admits of no paltering and of no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear‐cut issues and unambiguous speech."

"The average man is happier in the wrong with a crowd, than he is in the right with only one or two companions."

"Human society is born in the shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even today it is from the religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes. Religion is the last thing that man will civilise."

"Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive on servility and shrink before independence. They feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That is why the cry of gods at all times is "Worship us or we perish.""

"All my life I have made it a rule never to permit a religious man or woman take for granted that his or her religious beliefs deserved more consideration than non-religious beliefs or anti-religious ones. I never agree with that foolish statement that I ought to respect the views of others when I believe them to be wrong."

"Of the four terms ... Praise, Blame, Punishment, and Responsibility, the cardinal and governing one is the last."

"Facts are more insistent than theories, and in the last resort it is the nature of things which determine the course of our actions."

"Granting that an illusion may have its uses, it can only be of service so long as we do not know it to be an illusion."

"Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother."

"A good teacher does not draw out; he gives out, and what he gives out is love. And by love I mean approval, or if you like, friendliness, good nature. The good teacher not only understands the child: he approves of the child."

"If the emotions are free, the intellect will look after itself."

"A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing."

"Hate breeds hate, and love breeds love."

"My own criterion of success is the ability to work joyfully and to live positively."

"You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist."

"No one has the right to make a boy learn Latin, because learning is a matter for individual choice; but if in a Latin class, a boy fools all the time, the class should throw him out, because he interferes with the freedom of others."

"The problem of ideology ... has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation."

"Much of my professional life has been concerned with the politics of who we think we are. I've been riveted by the question of how we can understand the chaos of identifications which we seek to reach somehow, 'ourselves'. Of course this arrival never occurs; we'll never be ourselves, whatever that could mean."

"Although in various other academic fields and area studies, such as race science, postcolonial scholarship has completely deconstructed and exposed the colonial investment in the propagation of certain theories, the field of Indology, at least in present-day Western academic circles, has been very suspicious of these voices being raised against the theory of the Aryan invasions."

"One must beware of falling into a kind of uncritical Indological McCarthyism towards those open to reconsidering the established contours of ancient Indian history, irrespective of their motives and backgrounds, and of lumping all challenges into a simplistic, convenient and easily-demonized 'Hindu Nationalist' category."

"One can, of course, understand the concern over the extremes of Hindu nationalism given Europe’s own bitter history of Aryanism, although the fact is that much of the impetus fueling the ‘revisionism’ of the Indo-Aryan issue stems from distrust of the motives and agendas underpinning the entire construction and pursuit of the Indo-European homeland quest by Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries in the first place. Anyone who has at all dabbled with the history of this enterprise, rooted as it is in European racisms, nationalisms and quests for biblical origins, can hardly blame such a priori suspicion in the post-colonial climate of Indian historiography. ‘After all, much of the scholarship on the history of the Indian subcontinent was formulated during the colonial and imperial heyday of the 19th century. We thus have a complex situation where, on the one hand, there are valid and serious grounds for concern over nationalistic appropriation of myths of origin in present day India, and, on the other, equally valid grounds for submitting the entire Indo-European/Indo-Aryan locating enterprise to post-colonial scrutiny."

"I agree that a plausible explanation has yet to be given as to how, if there were indeed no actual invasion of Indo-Aryans but only the migratory ‘trickle’ into which it has been reconfigured, the newcomers could have completely eradicated the pre-existing language of the entire North of the subcontinent in the short interval normally allotted between their arrival and the composition of the Rgveda, in which the local topography is Indo-Aryan. When one considers that, in these proposed two or three centuries, such hypothetical migrants managed even to Sanskritize practically all of the names of rivers and places, the most conservative aspect of a substratum, in the N.W. of the subcontinent, but yet failed to do so in the East of the subcontinent despite Aryanizing it for well over two millennia, and the accomplishment is remarkable (and, of course, they failed to even displace the Dravidian languages in the South despite extensive interaction for almost as long). Add to this that their predecessors were the highly sophisticated and urbanized residents of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the incoming Indo-Aryans typically construed as pastoralist nomads, and Kazanas has a right to wonder how and why would the Indus Valley dwellers have so thoroughly and completely adopted the language of these illiterate herdsmen if the latter were not invaders — a status denied them by archaeology?"

"Unfortunately, the whole Indigenous Aryan position is often simplistically stereotyped, and conveniently demonized, both in India and in the West, as a discourse exclusively determined by such agendas. This bypasses other concerns also motivating such reconsideration of history: the desire of many Indian scholars to reclaim control over the reconstruction of the religious and cultural history of their country from the legacy of imperial and colonial scholarship. In chapter 131 discuss the manifold concerns that I perceive as motivating Indigenous Aryanists to undertake a reconsideration of this issue. I argue that although there are doubtlessly nationalistic and, in some quarters, communal agendas lurking behind some of this scholarship, a principal feature is anticolonial/imperial."

"On the other hand, and again on a personal note, I am also concerned at what I perceive to be a type of Indological McCarthyism creeping into areas of Western, as well as certain Indian, academic circles, whereby, as will be discussed in chapter 13, anyone reconsidering the status quo of Indo-Aryan origins is instantly and a priori dubbed a nationalist, a communalist, or, even worse, a Nazi."

"Perhaps this is an opportune moment to reveal my own present position on the Indo- European problem. I am one of a long list of people who do not believe that the avail- able data are sufficient to establish anything very conclusive about an Indo-European homeland, culture, or people. I am comfortable with the assumptions that cognate languages evolve from a reasonably standardized protoform (provided this is allowed con- siderable dialectal variation) that was spoken during a certain period of human history and culture in a somewhat condensed geographic area that is probably somewhere in the historically known Indo-European-speaking area (although I know of no solid grounds for excluding the possibility that this protolanguage could have originated outside of this area)."

"However, regarding homelands, I differ from most Western scholars in that I find myself hard pressed to absolutely eliminate the possibility that the eastern part of this region could be one possible candidate among several, albeit not a particularly convincing one, provided this area is delimited by Southeast Central Asia, Afghanistan, present- day Pakistan, and the northwest of the subcontinent (rather than the Indian subcontinent proper). I hasten to stress that it is not that the evidence favors this area as a possible homeland—on the contrary, there has been almost no convincing evidence brought for- ward in support of a homeland this far east. As we shall see, the issue is that problems arise when one tries to prove that the Indo-Aryans were intrusive into this area from an outside homeland. In other words, one has almost no grounds to argue for a South Asian Indo-European homeland from where the other speakers of the Indo-European language departed, but one can argue that much of the evidence brought forward to document tlieir entrance into the subcontinent is problematic. These are two separate, but obviously overlapping, issues."

"Coupled with the problems that have been raised against all homeland candidates, these issues have caused me conclude that, in the absence of radically new evidence or approaches to the presently available evidence, theories on the homeland of the Indo- European speaking peoples will never be convincingly proven to the satisfaction of even a majority of scholars."

"After these elements have been adequately processed and acknowledged, we can move forward, hopefully somewhat free from the ghosts of the past, to reexamine the actual evidence from the perspectives of our own present-day postcolonial academic culture."

"Suspicion of the theory based on scriptural testimony—or lack thereof—remains an explicit or implicit factor in much Indigenous Aryan discourse."

"The Rgvedic texts were read in the political context of nineteenth-century philology, which has been outlined in chapter 1. This certainly influenced the choice of possible inter- pretations placed on such words as andsa and on the battles of the Aryas and the Dasas. The racial interpretations extrapolated from the texts to support an Aryan migration have been justly challenged by both Indian and, albeit after the lag of a century, Western scholars. Their place in serious discussions of the Indo-Aryan problem is highly questionnable."

"There is ample evidence of foreign personages and tribes in the Vedic period. Kuiper lists some twenty-six names of Vedic individuals who have non-Indo-Aryan names, with which Mayrhofer concurs. Witzel points out that twenty-two out of fifty Rgvedic tribal names are not Indo-Aryan, with a majority of them occurring in later books."

"Many of die foreign terms for flora and fauna could simply indicate that these items have continually been imported into the subcontinent over the centuries, as continues to be the case today. The exception to this is place-names and river names, but the absence of foreign terms for the topography and hydronomy of the Northwest deprives us of significant evidence that has been used to establish substrata elsewhere."

"This raises the immediate objection that if archaeology cannot trace any consistent material culture identifiable as Indo-Aryan arriving into the subcontinent from outside, it most certainly cannot identify any such culture emanating out. Accordingly, as far as archaeology is concerned, we have reached a stalemate (although from a Migrationist perspective there is, arguably at least, some kind of chronological sequence of archaeological culture that at least heads toward the general direction of the subcontinent, even if it does not penetrate it). Ultimately, however, the Aryans cannot be satisfactorily identified in the archaeological record as either entering or exiting. The trajectory of the Indo-Aryans, indeed the necessity of their very existence, is a linguistic issue that archaeology, as most archaeologists are well aware, cannot locate in the archaeological record without engaging in what, to all intents and purposes, amounts to special and often complicated pleading. On the basis of the present evidence, linguistics cannot decisively determine with any significant degree of consensus where the original home- land actually was. And archaeology can only hope to be productive in identifying the material remains of a linguistic group if linguistics has already done the groundwork of pinpointing its geographic area of origin with a reasonable degree of precision."

"Accordingly, archaeology cannot deny the possibility that Indo-Aryan and Iranian (which were preceded by Indo-Iranian) languages might have been spoken in the area of the Punjab, Pakistan/Afghanistan, southeast central Asia/northeast Iran since the second, third or even fourth millennium B.C.E. The problem is chronological. In fact, archaeologically at least, South Asian archaeologists often draw attention to a cultural continuum that can be traced as far back as Mehrgarh in the seventh millennium B.C.E. within which innovations and developments can be explained simply by internal developments and external trade. If there were no constraints stemming from the date commonly assigned to the Veda, this whole area could have included urbanites and agriculturists from the South, as well as nomads and pastoralists from the North, interacting together in the millennia B.C.E. as they always have been and still do in the present day. Both steppe dwellers and urban farmers could have been speakers of related Indo-Iranian dialects in protohistory just as they are today and have always been in recorded history. There could have been invasions, migrations, trade, cultural exchanges, all manner of interactions—cultural evolution and devolution (followed sometimes by renewed evolution)—as well as all manner of diversification in chronological time. And all within a large, heterogeneous ethnic and cultural area of people who nonetheless spoke related dialects—whether living in towns, mountains, or agricultural plains—just as has always been die history of the subcontinent."

"In my view, the references connected with the fourth millennium B.C.E. date, although intriguing, are too speculative to be used as substantial evidence. In the post- 2500 B.C.E. period, however, the quality and quantity of references supporting the position of the sun in Krttika at the vernal equinox are more substantive. They should be given due consideration as a serious possibility. They are as valid a chronological indicator as anything else that has been brought forward to date the Vedic texts. But they cannot win the day in and of themselves without additional, outside support."

"But attention must also be given to the possibility that, in addition to the Indigenist discourses of the nationalists, there might be many other scholars who sincerely believe that the Aryan invasion theory is a seriously flawed historical construct produced by biased imperial powers with overt agendas of their own—in other words, that it was, and is, perceived as "bad history." Consideration must also be given to the perception of many Indian scholars that Europeans might have constructed the idea of an external home of the Aryans to "pander to a false sense of national pride" of their own. No doubt voices challenging the theory of Aryan invasions were, and are, often co- opted and even, in certain cases, initiated and sponsored by nationalist and communal elements, but a wide range of motives have inspired Indian scholars to challenge the idea of Aryan invasions or migrations. Not all historical "revisionism," by which I in- tend the literal meaning of the word in the sense of "reexamination," is necessarily nationalist nor, most certainly, communal a priori. Perhaps the use of the term ^revisionism would illustrate the point: let us not forget that it was Europeans who originally "re- vised" India's Brahmanical notions of history and then imposed their version of events on their subjects. While I do not intend to minimize or gloss over the importance of this issue to Hindu nationalism, my reading of the Indigenous Aryan school is that its concerns are also to a great extent anti-imperial and anticolonial: it is determined to review the revision. Not all who share this concern are necessarily also impelled to find reason to consider themselves the original inhabitants of India so as to enhance their social legitimacy vis-a-vis other communities on the subcontinent."

"However, in such generalizations, distinctions are often not made between communal revisionism and postcolonial reconsideration, and a kind of uncritical McCarthyism has developed in some quarters toward those who favor the Indigenous Aryan point of view, despite the fact that this view is on the ascendancy in India (or, perhaps, as a consequence of it) irrespective of the motives and backgrounds of those interested in this issue."

"The bitterness, antipathy, and sarcasm seeping from the pens of participants in this debate (from both sides of the fence) when referring (increasingly by name) to those holding opposing views is apparent for all to see"

"In a progressive academic context, differences of opinions, however radical, challenge scholars to constantly reexamine their views, assumptions, and methods. This is the lifeline of healthy scholarship. But in the present academic climate in the subcontinent, it has become increasingly difficult, particularly for Indian scholars, to discuss the pre- history of the subcontinent in a rational, objective way without becoming associated with the ideologies that are immediately correlated with pro- or contra- stances for or against the Indigenous Aryan issue. This works to the obvious detriment of expanding and developing a nuanced understanding of the early history of the subcontinent."

"Casting off the legacies of colonialism opens up exciting new possibilities for the understanding of Indian protohistory, provided the constraints of the colonial period are not replaced with an equally constraining insistence on a different ideologically driven reading of the historical evidence, whatever that ideology might be."

"Since there is a tendency to stereotype any local reconsiderations of ancient Indian history whatsoever as nationalist or communal, the purpose of this chapter is to suggest that a wide variety of motives inspire Indian scholars to revisit the topic of Indo-Aryan origins: it is erroneous to lump them all into a simplistic, hastily identified and easily demonized Hindutva category."

"One must be cautious about contributing to a sort of Indological McCarthyism whereby anyone reconsidering or challenging long- held assumptions pertaining to the Indo-Aryans is instantly dubbed a fundamentalist or nationalist or, more drastically, is accused of contributing to Nazi agendas. There is a tendency in Western, and in elements of Indian, academic circles to a priori stereo- type everyone reconsidering this aspect of Indian history in such ways"

"Scholars such as Renfrew and Gamkrelidze and Ivanov can radically challenge established Indo-European homeland theories in the West, but the academic culture in India has developed to the point that anyone attempting to even question established paradigms in early South Asian history is in danger of being dubbed a Nazi. Such a culture has been created as much by remarks made in a generic fashion by some of the opponents of the Indigenous Aryan school as by the bigoted statements of certain Hindu nationalist "Indigenists." It is obviously unconducive to the pursuit of impartial scholarly research that is making at least some effort to be objective."

"This all goes to show that ideological analysis, while indispensable in a historiographical study such as this, must refrain from straitjacketing individuals into convenient and easily identified stereotypes or groupings."

"This raises another dimension that the Indigenous Aryan critique forces us to confront: What constitutes authority in areas of knowledge, particularly where the evidence is sometimes as malleable, scanty, and inconclusive as much of that concerning the Indo-Aryans?"

"Philology and linguistics can actually offer surprisingly little to compel disenchanted Indian scholars to modify their suspicions of the ability of these disciplines to make authoritative pronouncements on the origins of the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples in prehistory."

"It was the testimony of the Bible that originally led scholars to propose the existence of a linguistically unified group of people living somewhere near the Caspian Sea, a subset of whom emanated forth and entered India. And it is the testimony of the Rgveda that is used to deny that any such people ever entered from any such place. The Bible laid the groundwork for the construction of the Aryan invasion theory, and the Rgveda has been the principal foundation for attempts at its deconstruction."

"Although European scholars have long since forgotten the biblical roots of the Aryan problem, Old Testament narrative was certainly an initial factor causing European scholars to interpret the data in selective ways. One must bear in mind that European notions of human history had been based on Genesis for the better part of a millennium and a half. This formative influence was strengthened and then superseded by research intimately connected with the specific political exigencies extant in nineteenth-century Eu- rope. This combination of factors contributed to the development of various assumptions concerning Indo-Aryan (and Indo-European) origins, some of which have remained by and large unquestioned, outside of India, to this very day."

"However, the interpretation of evidence being presented by the Indigenous Aryan group cannot be opposed because of the Hindutva element: that would equally be allowing ideological beliefs to manipulate historical interpretation. Critical scholarship is man- dated to attempt to detach debate on this topic from political orientations concerning personal visions for a modern Indian nation-state."

"Having said that, an attempt was made to make a distinction between Hindutva revisionism and scholarly historical reconsideration motivated by a desire to reexamine the way Indian history was assembled by the colonial power. Unfortunately, these two ingredients are not always easily distinguishable, nor detachable. Nonetheless, this anti- imperialistic, postcolonial dimension to the Aryan invasion debate is an inherent ingredient. Most scholars in this group are concerned with reclaiming control over the re- construction of the ancient history of their country."

"Nonetheless, a principal motive of many Indian scholars in this debate is the desire to reexamine the infrastructure of ancient history that is the legacy of the colonial period and test how secure it actually is by adopting the very tools and disciplines that had been used to construct it in the first place. The Aryan invasion theory is a major foundation stone of ancient Indian history, the "big bang," and has therefore attracted the initial attention of many Indian scholars."

"But frustrating as it might some- times be, Western scholars must address the suspicions of the Indigenists—at least of those that are open to dialogue and exchange—given the neccessity of examining our own attitudes and biases made incumbent on us by the Orientalist critique. The post- colonial climate is a sensitive one, and it should be obvious why there might be very good reasons for Indian scholars to want to reevaluate the version of Indian history that was constructed during the colonial period. One cannot ignore or dismiss the sentiments and opinions of significant numbers of scholars about the history of their own country. And it is never a bad exercise to have one's own assumptions challenged, or to step out of one's own time-worn paradigms momentarily so as to consider things from other perspectives."

"It is imperative, from the Indian side, that the powers that be in Indian universities must recognize the need for historical Indo-European linguistics in their humanities departments if they are to make significant contributions to the protohistory of their subcontinent. Indo-European studies should, if anything, be an Indian forte, not exclusively a European one; many Indian scholars have a distinct head start due to their advanced knowledge of Sanskrit, which still plays a fundamental and extensive role in this field. In particular, it is simply unacceptable that research into substratum influence in Sanskrit texts has primarily been the preserve of a dozen or so Western scholars, however qualified. Vedic, Dravidian, and Munda are Indian languages; this should be a field dominated by Indian linguists. That their input has been so negligible in the one area that could determine much about the whole protohistory of the subcontinent is lamentable. One cannot simply ignore the linguistic evidence. If nothing else, I hope my work has underscored the need for facility to be directed into this field. Much of the literature from the Indigenous Aryan side, and also from the Indian Migrationist side, is hopelessly inadequate from the perspective of linguistics. This has understandably caused the Indigenist point of view to be neglected in toto, to the detriment of the more scholarly, sober, and cogent voices espousing this version of events."

"Neglected viewpoints do not disappear. They reappear with more aggression due to frustration at being ignored. The Indigenous Aryan viewpoint has been around for over a century. It has been stereotyped and, on the whole, summarily dismissed and excluded from academic dialogue. It has hovered, until recently, on the periphery or outside of mainstream academic circles. Since, over the course of the last decade, it has become representative of many scholars within the Indian academy, it is now clamoring for attention more than ever before. It deserves a response articulated in a rigorously critical but fair and respectful fashion. If the claims of the Indigenous Aryanists cannot be decisively disproved, then they cannot be denied a legitimate place in discussions of Indo-Aryan origins. The opinions of significant numbers of Indian intellectuals about the history of their own country cannot simply be ignored by those engaged in research on South Asian history or be relegated to areas outside the boundaries of what is con- sidered worthy of serious academic attention."

"That the early inhabitants of India are still being construed as non-Aryan, snub-nosed dasas on the grounds of the solitary word anasa is astounding, and yet such theories have only very recently been questioned in the West, after a life span of a century and a half. When theories become sufficiently long-lived and commonplace, they cease to strike one as theoretical and can often be- come the facts and building blocks of subsequent realities."

"I trust I may be forgiven for not coming to a clear conclusion myself. Until the script is deciphered, the presently available data are not sufficient to resolve the issue in my mind. The Indo-European languages came from somewhere between the Caspian Sea area (and the Balkans) and northwest South Asia. I do not feel impelled to favor any particular area in this vast expanse: all homeland proposals (not least of all South Asian ones) have significant problems, as I have attempted to outline throughout this work. The Indigenous Aryan critique has certainly influenced my own agnosticism."

"In India, in particular, many scholars understandably are committed to exerting a major role on the construction and representation of the history of South Asia, and this to a great extent involves revisiting and scrutinizing the versions of history inherited from the colonial period."

"These chapters give a good sense of the range of what has been termed “revisionist” scholarship (I do not use this term with the derogatory sense that it has accrued, but in its literal sense of scholarship that is prepared to revise, that is, revisit and reconsider theories and versions of history formulated over the last two centuries)."

"Indeed, one might well wonder how much research would have been invested in the Indo-European problem in the first place, had it not been for its relevance to European imperialism and nationalism."

"In conclusion, any objective and honest attempt at presenting a comprehensive account of the pre-historic period in South Asia should give a fair and adequate representation of the differences of opinion on this matter, as well as of the criticisms that can be levied against any point of view."

"The Indo-Aryan problem is likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future, so we might as well attempt to address it in a cordial fashion."

"This is not the place to dwell on these debates, as important as they are. We will find a good overview in the very well informed and very balanced book by Edwin Bryant which, moreover, demonstrates that, all things considered, no scientific argument allows us to choose between the theses of Indian or extra-Indian origin of the Āryas and, consequently, of the Indo-Europeans... To anyone who doubts the fact that the commonly accepted opinion in the West on the origin of i-e language peoples is based primarily on an intuition that is difficult to demonstrate, I would recommend reading E. Bryant's book. We can clearly see that the debate resurfaces from generation to generation."

"If the man laughs, change the Order."

"Many disasters can be traced to our linguistic shortcomings. Millions of money and multitudes of men have been sacrificed in order to save the prestige of a mistake in translation committed "by authority.""

"The human mind is extremely limited, and amongst the limits imposed upon it are those of, in early life, connecting an idea, fact, or process, with certain words; and unless two languages, at least, are learnt, and those two are as dissimilar as possible, one is always, more or less, the slave of routine in the perception and in the application of new facts and of new ideas, and in the adaptation of any matter of either theoretical or practical importance. It is great advantage, for linguistic purposes, which are far more practically important than may be generally believed, that the study of Classical languages still holds the foremost place in this country (India); because, however necessary scientific "observation" may be, it cannot take the place of a cultured imagination."

"A good deal of our misconception with regard to the difficulty of the inquiry lies in ourselves that ideas of multitude connected with the peculiar customs of the race that have yet to be ascertained, are at the bottom of the inability of that race to follow our numeration."

"Is the Farmageddon scenario – the death of our countryside, a scourge of disease and billions starving – inevitable?"

"The harder farmers push animals beyond their natural limit, and the more closely animals are confined, often the greater the risk of disease and the heavier the reliance on vets to keep herds alive. Their weapon of choice is antibiotics. According to Dil Peeling, who qualified as a vet in the UK but spent much of his career working in developing countries: "A vet's worth is now measured by his or her ability to deliver on production and animal health – not welfare. It is difficult to persuade vets who have invested so much of their careers in propping up intensive farming to turn their back on such systems.""

"Once a virus gets into an intensive poultry shed it can move quickly through the flock, constantly replicating itself. Any "errors" or changes to the genetic code during replication don't get repaired: this is how the virus mutates and new variant strains emerge. The tragedy is that while intensive farms provide ideal conditions for the emergence of new aggressive disease strains, wild birds can then become infected too. Experience from the 2005 outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (AI) H5N1 suggests that the disease is more likely spread along major road and rail routes than on the flight routes of migratory birds."

"The UN has warned that global food supply needs to increase by 70–100 per cent by 2050. Yet today as much as half the food produced worldwide is squandered – binned, left to rot or fed to farm animals."

"Most people regard hierarchy in human societies as inevitable, a natural part of who we are. Yet this belief contradicts much of the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens. In fact, our ancestors have for the most part been “fiercely egalitarian”, intolerant of any form of inequality. While hunter-gatherers accepted that people had different skills, abilities and attributes, they aggressively rejected efforts to institutionalise them into any form of hierarchy. So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago."

"In prison for his part in the 1923 putsch, Hitler rethought the Italian example in the light of his own failure and concluded that he could only win power through the ballot box. Electoral propaganda was at first directed primarily at industrial workers, in the hope of detaching them from the KDP. But in the 1928 elections showed unexpected gains amongst the Protestant peasantry, who had suffered badly from the agricultural crisis. From then on was more targeted at conservative voters, and this paid off with electoral breakthrough in 1930."

"Despite the relative breadth of their appeal, the Nazis, with 37 per cent of the vote in July 1932, didn't have enough seats in parliament to govern. In a new election in November, they lost two million votes. Moreover, although conservative politicians, like the business, military, and land-owning elites, were hostile to the Republic, they distrusted the Nazis as 'brown Bolsheviks', and preferred an authoritarian government run by themselves. The problem was that the elites, rightly or wrongly, felt that no government could survive without mass support. This conviction testified to the extent to which 'democratic' assumptions had penetrated even the reactionary right. It also reflected the army's fear that it couldn't maintain order against both Communists and Nazis. For want of alternatives, the conservatives made Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933. Like Mussolini, Hitler alone bridged the gap between parliamentary and street politics."

"How many individuals, movements, and regimes we categorize as 'fascist' depends on definition. If we define fascism simply as a desire to manipulate the mass, or a dictatorship, then a great many would qualify. If we add the criteria of racism and/or antisemitism, a different set would be included. The impossibility of agreeing on a definition means that attempts to identify 'true fascism' can never be decisive. However, this difficulty does not prevent us from examining similarities and differences between various movements or actual interactions and borrowings—'entanglements', as scholar call them. I shall ask how and for what purposes the terms 'fascist' and 'national socialist' were used. Tracing entanglements allows us to see that relation of fascists were strongest with conservative groups, dictatorial or parliamentarian."

"During the 1930s Romanian fascism was highly complex: it consisted of several movements and layers which varied in intensity from to the genuine article. By far the most important, however, was the Legion and , Codreanu providing the sort of charismatic leadership which was more commonly associated with Hitler and Mussolini. His ideas also had much in common with Nazism. [...] Most of this cut little ice with those in power: the monarchy, the army officers and politicians. They were less concerned about mobilization of opinion that about the accumulation of power and about dealing with opponents; increasingly, Condreanu came to be seen as dangerous radical who would destabilize the regime. Although some observers claim that Carol was a 'monarcho-fascist', this term is not particularly appropriate. Carol was never inclined to any systematic ideology and remained traditional and conservative in his policies. This also applied to Michael and the Conducator, Antonescu. Yet, when the latter did finally succeeded in destroying the Legion, he ruled, in Payne's words as 'a right radical nationalist dictator with the support of the military'. Strangely, this was preferred by Hitler since Antonescu offered more security as a Romanian satellite. This was understandable because Hitler's main concern in 1941 was the military use of Romania rather than its complete ideological conversion. Hence, a conservative regime which had been radicalized by its contact with fascism was an ideal balance. In any case this radicalized conservationism proved to be one of the most extreme of all the European states in its policies toward the Jews."

"The Russian Revolution's impact on sections of the and the rise of the Labour Party profoundly disturbed important sections of the Conservative right and it was in these circles that first came into existence in 1923, when , who had served in the Women's Reserve Ambulance during the war, formed the , subsequently the British Fascists (BFs). Set up to oppose a feared communist uprising, the British Fascists organised in paramilitary units and was eventually to split during the 1926 General Strike over the government's insistence that the the British Fascists would have to drop the military structure before their assistance could be accepted in breaking the strike. An earlier split had taken away some of the most militant members, while the 1926 split deprived it of elements who prioritised anti-socialism over any specifically fascist affiliation. Later in the 1920s, yet another group, the , would bring together elements convinced that the BFs, rather than being truly fascist, had failed to break decisively with conservatism."

"Chomsky treats the battle against fascism as a battle for moral purity than can be won when the left remain respectful, polite, and deferent. But fascists have no interest in winning that battle. They don't care about respecting free speech or the ; they've openly declared their murderous intent towards (and other undesirables) and they'll pursue that goal by any means necessary. In this context, physical resistance is a duty, an act of self-defence, not an unsightly outpost of leftist moral decline. What's more - it works. From the in 1936 to similar confrontations in Lewisham and in London in 1977, physical resistance has time and again protected local populations from racist violence, and prevented a gathering caucus of fascists from making further inroads into mainstream politics."

"The scale of the movement was impressive, with over 120 committees established nationwide. The Antifa claimed 150,000 adherents. Many of these organisations broke through entrenched social barriers to include foreign slave labourers and establish working class unity across political parties and trade unions. Their functions ranged from creating local democracy, to restoring basic services like food supply. [...] The fact that so many committees adopted similar names and policies poses the question of whether there was a centralised organisation at work. Communists were prominent in nearly every Antifa despite the opposition of Moscow. Walter Ulbricht, the KPD leader, criticised the 'spontaneous creation of KPD bureaus, people's committees, and Free Germany committees', but he could do little as the KPD central apparatus had no communication link with the rank and file. Once communications were restored he could report: 'We have shut these [Antifas] down and told the comrades that all activities must be channelled through the state apparatus.' The Western Allies were equally disconcerted by the Antifas self-proclaimed 'ruthless struggle against all remnants of Hitler's party in the state apparatus, the local authorities and public life'. The US authorities expelled the committee from its offices, ordered the removal of all leaflets and posters from the streets, and then banned it. Any further use of the name 'Free Germany National Committee' would be punished severely. The military government stopped 's workplace councils purging Nazi activists and then abolished them. 's Nazis had been arrested by the Antifa, but were liberated by Allied command. When Antifa housed people made homeless by bombing in apartments abandoned by fleeing Nazis, the authorities evicted them."

"The Gazetteer of Oudh adds important details on the confrontation and its outcome: ―In 1855, when a great rupture took place between the Hindus and Muhammadans, the former occupied the Hanomān Garhi in force, while the Musalmans took possession of the Janamasthān. The Muhammadans on that occasion actually charged up the steps of the Hanomān Garhi, but were driven back with considerable loss. The Hindus then followed up this success, and at the third attempt, took the Janamasthān, at the gate of which seventy-five Muhammadans are buried in the ‗Martyrs‘ grave‘ (Ganj-i-Shahīdān . ) Eleven Hindus were killed. Several of the King‘s regiments were looking on all the time, but their orders were not to interfere. It is said that up to that time the Hindus and Muhammadans alike used to worship in the mosque-temple. Since British rule a railing has been put up to prevent disputes, within which, in the mosque the Muhammadans pray; while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platform on which they make their offerings."

"It is locally affirmed that at the Muhammadan conquest there were three important Hindu shrines, with but few devotees attached, at Ajodhya, which was then little other than a wilderness. These were the ‗Janamasthān,‘ the ‗Swargaddwār mandir‘ also known as ‗Rām Darbār,‘ ‗Treta-ke-Thākur.‘ On the first of these the Emperor Bābar built the mosque, which still bears his name, A.D. 1528. On the second, Aurangzeb did the same, A.D. 1658 to 1707; and on the third, that sovereign or his predecessors built a mosque, according to the well-known Muhammadan principle of enforcing their religion on all those whom they conquered. The Janamasthān marks the place where Rām Chandar was born. The Swargaddwār is the gate through which he passed into paradise, possibly the spot where his body was burned. The Treta-ke-Thākur was famous as the place where Rāma performed a great sacrifice, and which he commemorated by setting up there images of himself and Sīta. ... If Ajodhya was then little other than a wilderness, it must at least have possessed a fine temple in the Janamasthān; for many of its columns are still in existence and in good preservation, having been used by the Musalmans in the construction of the Bābari mosque. These are of strong close-grained, dark-colored or black stone, called by the natives kasauti (literally, touch-stone slate,) and carved with different devices. To my thinking, these more strongly resemble Buddhist pillars than those I have seen at Benares and elsewhere. They are from seven to eight feet long, square at the base, centre and capital, and round or octagonal intermediately. ... The two other old mosques to which allusion has been made (known by the common people by the name of Naurang Shah, by whom they mean Aurangzeb) are now mere picturesque ruins.‖"

"A fine temple in the Janmasthan; for many of its columns arc still in existence and in good preservation, having been used by the Musalmans in the construction of the Babari Mosque. ... The Janmasthan is within a few hundred paces of the Hanuman Garhi. In 1855 when a great rupture took place between the Hindus and Mahomedans the former occupied the Hanuman Garhi in force, while the Musalmans took possession of the Janmasthana. The Mahomedans on that occasion actually charged up the steps of the Hanuman Garhi, but were driven back with considerable loss. The Hindus then followed up this success, and at the third attempt, took the Janmasthan, at the gate of which 75 Mahomedans are buried in the “Martyrs’ grave” (Ganj-Shahid). Several of the King’s Regiments were looking on all the time, but their orders were not to interfere ... It is said that up to that time, the Hindus and Mohamedans alike used to worship in the mosque-temple. Since the British rule a railing has been put up to prevent dispute, within which, in the mosque the Mohamedans pray, while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platform on which they make their offerings."

"It is locally affirmed that at the Mahomedan conquest there were' three important Hindu shrines ... at Ayodhya. These were the Janmasthan, the Sargadwar Mandir and the Treta- ka-Thakur. On the first of these Babar built the mosque which still bears his name ... On the second, Aurangzeb did the same ... and on the third that sovereign, or his predecessor, built a mosque, according to the well-known Mahomedan principle of enforcing their religion on all whom they conquered"

"The bigot by whom the temples were destroyed, is said to have erected mosques on the situations of the most remarkable temples; but the mosque at Ayodhya... is ascertained by an inscription on its walls... to have been built by Babur (...) The only thing except these two figures and the bricks, that could with probability be traced to the ancient city, are some pillars in the mosque built by Babur, These are of black stone, and of an order which I have seen nowhere else, and which will be understood from the accompanying drawing. That they have been taken from a Hindu building, is evident, from the traces of images being observable on some of their bases; although the images have been cut off to satisfy the conscience of the bigot."

"Unfortunately, if these temples ever existed, not the smallest trace of them remains to enable us to judge of the period when they were built; and the destruction is very generally attributed' by the Hindus to the furious zeal of Aurungzebe, to whom also is imputed the overthrow of the temples in Bena- res and Mathura. What may have been the case in the two latter, I shall not now take upon myself to say, but with respect to Ayodhya the tradition seems very ill founded. The bigot by whom the temples were destroyed, is said to have erected mosques on the situations of the most remarkable temples; but the mosque at Ayodhya, which is by far the most entire, and which has every appearance of being the most modern, is as- certained by an inscription on its walls (of which a copy is given) to have been built by Babur, five generations before Aurungzebe."

"This renders the whole story of Vikrama exceedingly doubtful, especially as what are said to be the ruins of his fort, do not in any essential degree differ from those said to have belonged to the ancient city, that is, consist en- tirely of irregular heaps of broken bricks, covered with soil, and remarkably productive of tobacco ; and, from its name, Ramgar, I am inclined to suppose that it was a part of the building actually erected by Rama."

"The only thing except these two figures and the bricks, that could with probability be traced to the ancient city, are some pillars in the mosque built by Babur, These are of black stone, and of an order which I have seen nowhere else, and which will be understood from the accompanying drawing. That they have been taken from a Hindu build- ing, is evident, from the traces of ima- ges being observable on some of their bases; although the images have been cut off to satisfy the conscience of the bigot. It is possible that these pillars have belonged to a temple built by Vikrama; but I think the existence of such temples doubtful ; and, if they did not exist, it is proba- ble that the pillars were taken from the ruins of the palace."

"As European powers expanded into Asia, knowledge of its religions became more soundly based. Changes in European thought also led to some receptivity to ideas from non-Christian religions. In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on ‘reason’ and ‘science’ weakened reliance on authoritative ‘revelation’ in religious matters, and a number of people thought that they saw a ‘natural religion’ held in common by people of all cultures, though best expressed in Christianity. In the nineteenth century, advances in geology and Biblical studies led to a weakening of Biblical literalism, and the concept of biological evolution seemed, to many, to cast doubts on the ‘revealed’ Christian account of creation. In this context, the idea of making a ‘scientific’, ‘comparative’ study of all religions came to be advanced."

"These elements came together in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when there was something of a vogue for (modernist) Buddhism among sections of the middle classes in America, Britain and Germany. Like Christianity, Buddhism had a noble ethical system, but it appeared to be a religion of self-help, not dependent on God or priests. Like science, it seemed to be based on experience, saw the universe as ruled by law, and did not regard humans and animals as radically distinct. Yet for those with a taste for mysticism, such as those touched by the Romantic movement, it offered more than science."

"From 986 CE, the Muslim Turks started raiding northwest India from Afghanistan, plundering western India early in the eleventh century. Forced conversions to Islam were made, and Buddhist images smashed, due to the Islamic dislike of idolatry. Indeed in India, the Islamic term for an 'idol' became 'budd'."

"A significant section of early Englishmen in India also found in Indian culture “a deep and appealing wisdom.” John Z. Holwell (1711-1798), in his Interesting Historical Events, relative to the Provinces of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan (1767), declared that “the world does not now contain annals of more indisputable antiquity than those delivered down by the ancient Brahmins.” He avowed that the people “from the earliest times have been an ornament to the creation if so much can with propriety be said of any known people upon earth.”"

"Holwell wrote in his preliminary discourse to the Religious Tenets of the Gentoos, "Having studiously perused all that has been written of the empire of Indostan, both as to its ancient as well as more modern state; as also the various accounts transmitted to us, by authors in almost all ages.... I venture to pronounce them all very defective, fallacious and unsatisfactory to an inquisitive searcher after truth; and only tending to convey a very imperfect and injurious resemblance of a people, who from the earliest times have been an ornament to the creation if so much can with propriety be said of any known people upon earth.""

"A mere description of the exterior manners and religion of a people, will no more give us a true idea of them than a geographical description of a country can convey a just conception of their laws and government. The traveller must sink deeper in his researches.... His telling us such and such a people, in the East or West Indies, worship this stork, or that stone, or monstrous idol; only serves to reduce in our esteem our fellow creatures to the most abject and despicable point of light. Whereas, was he skilled in the language of the people he describes, sufficiently to trace the etymology of their words and phrases, and capable of diving into the mysteries of their theology; he would probably be able to evince to us, that such seemingly preposterous worship, had the most sublime rational source and foundation.""

"The mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins."

"[T]here is no greatness in things. Things cannot be great. The only greatness is unselfish love."

"The test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but "How have I loved?”"

"I lived for myself, I thought for myself, For myself, and none beside— Just as if Jesus had never lived, As if He had never died."

"I knew Mr. Henry Drummond, and the memory of his strong, warm hand-clasp is like a benediction. He was the most sympathetic of companions. He knew so much and was so genial that it was impossible to feel dull in his presence."

"I would have been a much more popular World Champion if I had always said what people wanted to hear. I might have been dead, but definitely more popular."

"When you've got dyslexia and you find something you're good at, you put more into it than anyone else; you can't think the way of the clever folk, so you're always thinking out of the box. So you sometimes can be considerably better at what you latch onto than anybody else. It saved my life, because I had been humiliated and frustrated."

"An empire had been won: there remained the task of providing for its administration and its defence. The gain in mere territory was in itself stupendous; and though much of it might be but thinly populated, yet new territory implied new subjects. Apart from India, where, as shall be told in its place, the work of conquest had not been bounded by the the expulsion of the French, the Spaniard required to be conciliated anew in Minorca; while in the West Indies, and still more in Canada and Florida, there were not only French and Spanish Colonists that must be absorbed, but large tribes of Indians, formerly dependent upon them, who must be summoned suddenly to cancel ancient treaties and friendships, and, though themselves unconquered, to transfer their amity to the nation that had vanquished their former allies."

"Let us clear our minds of cant. What is the economy of this world, so far as we have eyes to see and intellects to understand it, but destruction and renewal, destruction and renewal? And it is really impossible, except by out petty human standards, to distinguish the one from the other."

"To turn now to the great enemy, Napoleon appears to have thought in 1810 that his work of subduing Europe was nearly done; and indeed the year 1811 was the quietest that he spent during the whole of his reign as Consul or Emperor. France, being no extreme sufferer from the Continental Blockade, was fairly tranquil and contented; and even the subject states might with proper management have become so likewise. Napoleon's administration in many countries, most notably in Italy and Western Germany, was a great improvement upon that of the former rulers; and, but for the incessant exactions of men and money, his government might very well have gained popularity. But it never occurred to Napoleon to win the hearts of the people whom he subjugated. To him they were instruments not children, tributaries not subjects, for his whole Empire was little more to him than an organised coalition for the overthrow of England."

"As long as one man has a greater brain or a stronger arm than another—nay, so long as one woman has a more beautiful head of hair than another—so long will there be envy, jealousy, hatred, malice, and war."

"Negativity is a trait, not someone’s identity. A person’s true nature can be obscured by clouds, but, like the sun, it is always there. And clouds can overcome any of us. We have to understand this when we deal with people who exude negative energy. Just like we wouldn’t want someone to judge us by our worst moments, we must be careful not to do that to others. When someone hurts you, it’s because they’re hurt. Their hurt is simply spilling over. They need help. And as the Dalai Lama says, “If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them."

"Remember, saying whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, is not freedom. Real freedom is not feeling the need to say these things."

"When we accept the temporary nature of everything in our lives, we can feel gratitude for the good fortune of getting to borrow them for a time."

"When you try to live your most authentic life, some of your relationships will be put in jeopardy. Losing them is a risk worth bearing; finding a way to keep them in your life is a challenge worth taking on."

"It feels good to be around people who are good for us; it doesn't feel good to be around people who don't support us or bring out our bad habits."

"When we criticize others, we can't help but notice the bad in ourselves. But when we look for the good in others, we start to see the best in ourselves too."

"Negativity is a trait, not someone's identity. A person's true nature can be obscured by clouds, but, like the sun, it is always there. And clouds can overcome any of us. We have to understand this when we deal with people who exude negative energy. Just like we wouldn't want someone to judge us by our worst moments, we must be careful not to do that to others. When someone hurts you, it's because they're hurt. Their hurt is simply spilling over. They need help."

"The more we define ourselves in relation to the people around us, the more lost we are."

"We think freedom means that we can pursue all our desires. Real freedom is letting go of things not wanted, the unchecked desires that leas us to unwanted ends."

"Transformational forgiveness is linked to a slew of health improvements including: fewer medications taken, better sleep quality, and reduced somatic symptoms including back pain, headache, nausea, and fatigue. Forgiveness eases stress, because we no longer recycle the angry thoughts, both conscious and subconscious, that stressed us out in the first place."

"The less time you fixate on everyone else, the more time you have to focus on yourself."

"Fear motivates us. Sometimes it motivates us toward what we want, but sometimes, if we aren't careful, it limits us with what we think will keep us safe."

"Instead of forever climbing the mountain of success, we need to descend into the valley of our true selves to weed out false beliefs."

"... But what would happen if genetic determinism could be destroyed once and for all? Will men cease to be patriarchal? And will the rich distribute their possessions to the poor? Fat chance."

"... The male emperor penguin brooding his mate's egg over the Antarctic winter cannot be relieved by his mate because the growth of the ice shelf puts the sea and food beyond reach. So, in the interests of producing an offspring, he fasts for months—a feat any human would find impossible. Other potential solutions to this problem, such as shorter stints of breeding and trekking repeatedly across the ice shelf during the winter, presumably proved to be less successful. The penguins that fasted all winter were the ones whose ancestors had best survived with this adaptation. Examples like this emphasise how dependent is the organisation of behaviour on the ecology of the species. Differences between individuals in the processes of development are to be expected."

"The growing interest in mating preferences in animals has been generated in part by the renewed vitality of evolutionary biology. A characteristic that successfully attracts a member of the opposite sex might become increasingly common in the population simply because it is likely to be transmitted to offspring which in turn may be better than others in winning mates This evolutionary process, which is a part of what is called sexual selection, could be an important source of genetic change."

"Hybrid vigour is so dramatic when it occurs that it seems to make the arguments for outbreeding depression implausible. Nevertheless, some empirical evidence supports the view that outbreeding too much can carry genetic costs in certain species."

"If one weighs his [Carl von Clausewitz] influence and his emphasis, one might describe him historically as the Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre. For he was the source of the doctrine of "absolute war", the fight to a finish theory which, beginning with the argument that "war is only a continuation of state policy by other means", ended by making policy the slave of strategy."

"Clausewitz's principle of force without limit and without calculation of cost fits, and is only fit for, a hate-maddened mob. It is the negation of statesmanship—and of intelligent strategy, which seeks to serve the ends of policy."

"At present one clear factor in the problem is that the offensive is as much at an advantage in the air as it is at a disadvantage on land. This comparison, in conjunction with our present deficiencies, has suggested that the offensive role of an expeditionary force might be entrusted to the Air Force. Apart from its greater promise of effect, it could be conducted from our own shores or from bases more easy to secure and more remote from the enemy than the zone an army requires; and it would avoid many of the complications involved, and evolving, when we land an army on the Continent. The Army could then be left to fulfil its Imperial garrison and police duties, with the possible addition of covering the oversea bases of our Expeditionary Air Force."

"Unless our field force could arrive on the scene during this opening phase—and it is difficult to see how it could, since it has to cross the sea—our assistance might be more profitably given in the form of a proportionately larger contribution in air strength."

"The new risks to such a force under modern military conditions have also to be weighed. The risks that were incurred in 1914, in landing a field force of 100,000 men in a foreign land, were much less than would be run to-day—when it may have greater distances to cover, and when both railways and roads will lie under the menace of air attack. Broken communications are bad enough when an army is in its own territory, or one where it has complete control. In face of air attack it is impossible to ignore the risk of a field force being stranded with no prospect either of reaching the front or of maintaining itself. In such a plight it could do little for the defence of British interests and it would be more nuisance than a help to any ally... Before the idea of intervention by land is accepted as politically indispensable, there should be full acknowledgement of its unstable military foundations. It should also be made clear to any nation looking to British aid, whether under the old Locarno Treaty or under its possible successor, first, that they may get more value from increased air assistance, which would naturally become effective sooner, in place of a field force; secondly, that the dispatch of a field force cannot imply a willingness to reinforce it without limit, and to expend the massed man-power of this nation, fully engaged as it must be by sea and and in the air, and in factory and farm, in another four years' process of exploring by trial and error a problem which can be, and could have been, examined scientifically."

"I have been reading Europe in Arms by Liddell Hart. If you have not already done so, you might find it interesting to glance at this, especially the chapter on the "Role of the British Army.""

"Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning 'lightning war'. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart's view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more 'indirect approach', he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike."

"The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany. With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that 'the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars', dismissing motorized weapons as mere 'accessories to the man and horse'. Haig's brother concurred: the cavalry would 'never be scrapped to make room for the tanks'. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart's work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of 'a new type of warfare on the largest scale' that he learned the importance of 'the concentration of armour'."

"It was principally the books and articles of the Englishmen, Fuller, Liddell Hart and Martel, that excited my interest and gave me food for thought. These far-sighted soldiers were even then trying to make of the tank something more than just an infantry support weapon. They envisaged it in relationship to the growing motorization of our age, and thus they became the pioneers of a new type of warfare on the largest scale. I learned from them the concentration of armour, as employed in the battle of Cambrai. Further, it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army's communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army. So I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart."

"I immediately read the "Role of the British Army" in Liddell Hart's book. I am impressed by his general theories."

"It would be doing Liddell Hart an injustice, both as a historian and as a controversialist, to suggest that this analysis of British strategy was anything more than a piece of brilliant political pamphleteering, sharply argued, selectively illustrated, and concerned rather to influence British public opinion and government policy than to illuminate the complexities of the past in any serious or scholarly way."

"The real shortcoming of these stimulating essays...lies in Captain Liddell Hart's unwillingness to admit that war has changed its character. "Limited aims" strategy implies that your enemy is very much the same kind of person as yourself; you want to get the better of him, but it is not necessary for your safety to annihilate him or even to interfere with his internal politics. These conditions...have disappeared in the atomised world in which we are now living. Writing in 1932 or thereabouts, Captain Liddell Hart is able to say, "Has there ever been such a thing as absolute war since nations ceased to exterminate or enslave the defeated?" The trouble is that they haven't ceased. Slavery, which seemed as remote as cannibalism in 1932, is visibly returning in 1942, and in such circumstances it is impossible to wage the old style limited profit-making war, intent only on "safeguarding British interests" and making peace at the first opportune moment. As Mussolini has truly said, democracy and totalitarianism cannot exist side by side."

"To some extent Captain Liddell Hart's tactical theories are separable from his strategic ones, and here his prophecies have been all too well justified by events. No military writer in our time has done more to enlighten public opinion. But his justified war with the Blimps has perhaps overcoloured his judgment... Disgusted by the spectacle of Passchendaele, Captain Liddell Hart seems to have ended by believing that wars can be won on the defensive or without fighting—and even, indeed, that a war is better half-won than won outright. That holds good only when your enemy thinks likewise, a state of affairs which disappeared when Europe ceased to be ruled by an aristocracy."

"Photographs of industrial rows of cramped pens, each imprisoning a solitary calf, will shock those who still believe in the fairytale of the pastoral dairy farm … In reality, the daily practices of most dairy farms are more distressing than those of meat production. A mother cow only produces milk when she gets pregnant. So, starting from the age of 15 months, she will usually be artificially inseminated. … When she gives birth, her calf will typically be removed within 36 hours … Following that callous separation, the mother will bellow and scream for days, wondering where her baby is. The answer depends on the gender of the calf. If male, he will probably either be shot and tossed into a bin, or sold to be raised for veal, which delays his death by just a matter of months. But if the calf is female, she will usually be prepared for her own entry into dairy production, where she will face the same cycle of hell that her mother is trapped in … Dairy is proving to be a vulnerable spot for the entire slaughter racket. The public is steadily waking up to the fact that the reality of milk production is not a matter of trivial imperfections, of concern only to idealist vegans, but in fact the most dark and wicked part of all farming."

"If you can’t go vegan for the animals, why not go vegan for yourself? By switching to a plant-based diet, you won’t just help save animals’ lives, you might just save the planet. The meat and dairy industries kill 70bn animals every year – and a new report has found that they are on track to become the world’s biggest contributors to climate change. … Eventually, a tipping point will come, and the planet will turn into a gigantic slaughterhouse. It won’t be just calves and piglets these industries are killing – it will be you, your children and the children they could have gone on to raise. … So each time you eat bacon, or drink milk, you have not only invested in the slaughter of pigs or the abuse of cows, you’ve signed your own death warrant. For this is a problem that is predicted to escalate in the coming decades and emissions for agriculture are projected to increase 80% by 2050. In the 1980s, people started saying ‘meat is murder’, but it could become even worse than that – meat could mean Armageddon."

"Rigid dogma about what is and is not ’authentic’ has hamstrung architects. We need to break out of these shackles and recognise that all architecture is drawing from the past."

"It is now widely agreed that the economy of western Europe contracted in the later Middle Ages, but the causes of this depression and its time-limits are still disputed. Professor Postan argues that the depression was intimately connected with a decline in population beginning early in the fourteenth century and brought about by the operation of Malthusian checks and soil exhaustion."

"Much work that is absolutely essential for the continuance and progress of an ordered society has a severely limited attraction for those who perform it. How, nevertheless, men and women were persuaded to work regularly or at all in the Middle Ages has provided one of the central themes in the study of the period, for this is what we study in the institutions of slavery, serfdom and villeinage—all three were ways and means of persuading reluctant workers to work."

"Between the early fifteenth century and the late, the expectation of life of a monk at age 20 fell by eight years, and at age 25 by more than six."

"In his Rule, St. Benedict entrusted all the material concerns of the monastery to a single official. The cellarer, as he was called, was to follow the abbot's instructions in all things, but with this proviso it was to give the monks their due allowance of food at the appointed time, take care of the sick, the children who were then part of the monastic community, and the poor, and look after the monster's utensils and property as though these were the sacred vessels of the altar."

"... Where do the Neanderthals fit in? They take us way back beyond fingers tracing beasts on stone walls. While it's impossible to pinpoint the 'first' of their kind, they became a distinct population 450 to 400 thousand years ago (ka). The night sky then hanging over earth's many hominid populations would have been alien, our solar system light years away from its current position in a never-ending galactic waltz. Pause halfway through the Neanderthals' temporal dominion at around 120 ka, and while the land and rivers are mostly recognisable, the world feels different. It's warmer and ice melt-swollen oceans have flooded the land, shoving beaches many metres higher. Startlingly tropical beast roam even the great valleys of Northern Europe. In total, the Neanderthals endured for an astonishing 350,000 years, until we lose sight of them — or, at least their fossils and artifacts — somewhere around 40 ka."

"Neanderthals went through repeated cycles of cold conditions and then warm conditions where there were forests developing. ... When musk oxen turn up in the archaeological record, most of the time there are not Neanderthals."

"Neanderthals knew all sorts of landscapes and climates and different geographies. There is so much more to Neanderthals than the popular image of them ... I wanted to really try to share the way that archaeology is like a multi-disciplinary discipline and a lot of what we do actually is about world-building and how we look at the Neanderthals ... recreating the contextual world."

"Racism is a worldwide phenomenon. In some countries it's met with disapproval, in others with denial. The A to Z of ethnic and religious groups in the Middle East embraces Alawites, Armenians, Assyrians, Baháʼís, Berbers, Copts, Druzes, Ibadis, Ismailis, Jews, Kurds, Maronites, Sahrawis, Tuareq, Turkmens, Yazidis and Zaidis and Nubians (by no means an exhaustive list), and yet serious discussion of ethnic/religious diversity and its place in society is a long-standing taboo. If the existence of non-Arab or non-Muslim groups is acknowledged at all, it is usually only to declare how wonderfully everyone gets along."

"Whatever your views on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – and there are many – [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]]'s move is plainly an own goal (assuming his goal is to support Palestinians, rather than generate publicity for himself). One reason that many left-leaning Jews don't join the BDS movement is precisely because the boycott is perceived to be about rage against people, rather than an effective political tool. What's the best way to cement that belief? Announce you're avoiding Israelis as part of your commitment to BDS. Cue a flood of "told you sos" from those who say its all about punishing Israelis just for being who they are."

"Every British Jew has their own family story – of emigration and immigration, of threats and losses, but also of community and belonging. My own family’s journey to the UK from Iraq via Israel – two places fatefully touched by the influence of empire – may explain my own lack of shock at the callous, divisive and biased treatment of minority communities by the British political class, Labour included. Remembering Britain's history is not an excuse for today's politicians, or a minimisation of the real and noxious racism that still permeates our society. But it should be a reminder that for many in Britain, the experience of racism is still the norm and not the exception."

"[Following Boris Johnson's three days in intensive care with Covid-19 in spring 2020] A national leader in critical condition is an unsettling jolt, especially in the midst of an anxiety-drenched pandemic. But in Britain’s news media, the prime minister’s condition seemed to crowd out concern for others, and the exaltations of Mr. Johnson dampened scrutiny of his government’s failures."

"But Mr. Johnson had set a terrible example at work, breezily claiming he'd shaken hands with Covid-19 patients, crowding into Parliament and undermining health messages with his joshing delivery. Meanwhile, dozens of doctors and nurses were dying of the virus, among them several of the thousands who had answered the government call to come out of retirement to work in the N.H.S. during the pandemic. Reports emerged of staff members "bullied and shamed" into treating Covid-19 patients without the equipment needed to protect themselves, which the World Health Organization had warned in early February would be needed in vast supply."

"[[w:Noam Shuster-Eliassi|[Noam] Shuster]] worked with a women's health organisation in Rwanda before becoming a co-director of the Israel programme at Interpeace, a peacebuilding organisation set up by the UN. Shuster concentrated on a project working with Jewish settlers, the ultra-Orthodox and other groups either resistant to or excluded from standard peace camp initiatives. For Shuster, reaching out to such communities was a key part of conflict resolution, but the UN disbanded the project in 2017."

"She started writing jokes, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, trying to communicate the topics and ideas she had felt unable to broach within the confines of the peace industry. "You start with open mic slots, you bomb, you fall on your face a million times, you sharpen your material,” she says. But there was a receptive audience for a half-Iranian Israeli woman cracking jokes about the absurdities and injustices of Israel's decades-long military occupation."

"[On Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie] The film does make central an argument based on antisemitic conspiracy layered upon conspiracy. First, there is the idea that Jewish groups within Labour and in Britain are de facto pro-Israel fronts. Then, that such groups nefariously exerted outsized power – “orchestrating” the demise of a Labour leader, no less – and that Israel was pretty much behind all of this. Hence claims of Labour antisemitism were only ever false – indeed they are exclusively referred to as "smears" throughout the film’s narrative voiceover."

"We might also add, to those defending the film on the grounds that it features several Jewish voices, that this is a terrible fig leaf. Would we apply the same logic to people of colour dismissing the legitimacy of claims of anti-Black racism or Islamophobia? One would hope not."

"Proponents of the "smears" and #itwasascam narratives tend to see two oppositional camps: either you are a genuine socialist and sincerely committed to the Palestinian cause, or you are an anti-Corbyn liberal washout and advocate for Israel. This false dichotomy must be rejected outright."

"Everyone can, hopefully, agree that a connection to Israel should not make British Jews a target for antisemitism, which spikes every time that tensions in the region escalate. We might also agree not to infer that anyone with a "connection" to Israel automatically supports the state's violent policies towards the Palestinian people. But from there on, things get murky. One can passionately disagree with a British Jewish person’s appraisal of the Gaza war as "self-defence", but not be motivated by anti-Jewish hatred. One can be distressed by the apocalyptic images coming out of the Palestinian strip and wonder how anyone might justify such horrors, yet not be fuelled by antisemitism. But the different motivations lying behind criticism have been terribly conflated amid a fearful Jewish minority and its established leadership."

"Omnipresent on our screens, the redoubtable Shabi is one of the few Corbyn supporting commentators to be taken seriously by the media. Thoughtful and fluent, she deserves her massive rise in this year’s list."

"Shabi contends that the need to show a united front against the common enemy has meant that Israel has taken a long time to confront this discrimination [against Mizrahi Jews] and develop the equal opportunities so familiar to us in modern Britain. What is more, she argues, consigning the Mizrahi Jews to a lower status than Ashkenazi Jews has resulted in a huge missed opportunity for improving Israel's relations with its neighbours."

"Israel has changed radically since the days of its Ashkenazi founding fathers and mothers but Shabi's important book is nonetheless a wake-up call to modern Israeli society. For a nation to be able to call itself a true democracy, all of its citizens must feel equally enabled and valued."

"(About the 2018 interview Cathy Newman did with Jordan Peterson): I can't understand how no one in Channel four saw that and went "We can't possibly put this out there. It's embarrassing." but they did and they got the attention they deserved. But what they don't realize, these people, is it's one time attention. You watch that interview and you will never watch an interview with Cathy Newman again."

"I'm a non-believer, but I can't help but think that what we've created as a society when we killed God is a vacuum that inevitably has to be filled. And when it gets filled, it gets filled by a new religion which is what social justice and intersectionality and all of that now is. They have priests. They have inquisitions. The only thing they don't have in that religion is redemption and forgiveness. [...] If we don't have forgiveness, I don't understand how this world is gonna work. I honestly don't."

"Free speech is not some right-wing reframing of whatever; it is the foundation of Western civilization."

"The only way to deal with the problem of racism is to treat people on the content of their character and nothing else, and the fact that woke culture seeks to overturn that is a new form of racism that we must all oppose."

"This country is responsible for 2 percent of global carbon emissions, which means that if Britain was to sink into the sea right now it would make absolutely no difference to the issue of climate change. You know why? Because the future of the climate is going to be decided in Asia and in Latin America. By poor people who couldn't give a shit about saving the climate. [...] Do you know why? Because they're poor. [...] 120 million people in China do not have enough food. I don't mean that they don't get dessert, I mean they suffer from malnutrition. That means that their immune system is breaking down because they don't have enough food. You're not going to get them to stay poor."

"I actually get invited on TV a lot nowadays, and I don't do as much of it as I used to. And part of the reason is that once you've [got] the heroin of a long term conversation, why would you drop down to methadone? This is so much more fulfilling and satisfying. We're sitting here for a good chunk of time, you're giving me the space to speak, you're not talking over me, you're not trying to make me look bad [...], and [in corporate media] you get three minutes to make one point. And look, there's a market out there for that [but] I enjoy this. I enjoy having a conversation [and] connecting with somebody, getting to know how they think and them getting to know how I think, disagreeing where there's disagreement but doing it in a constructive way as opposed to going for the click bait and all of that. That is a really fulfilling part of doing Triggernometry for me. We get to interview fascinating people [...] and we just sit and learn. [...] How many people get the opportunity to sit down with a great mind for an hour and just engage, and speak, and listen, and think about the world? To me, that is incredibly gratifying. And I don't think that if i was hosting something on TV [that] I'd get a chance to do that."

"Rather than us exporting liberal democracy to these countries instead we're importing Chinese-style authoritarianism."

"When you have some kid, who works for Twitter in the Philippines, censoring a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, speaking about his area of expertise, I think we've lost the plot."

"[About the importance of saying what you think]: We come from generations of people who were killed for their beliefs. Well, I'm not going to dishonor them."

"Francis Foster: Everybody knows that Joe Biden isn't in charge. He simply can't be. Konstantin Kisin: He could be, but that's worse."

"During the whole Ngozi Fulani affair, it was covered like it was a terrorist attack when you sort of think there's probably much bigger core issues affecting way more people."

"[About vaccination mandates after the Covid-19 pandemic:] I'm against mandates and I'm against mandates of vaccination, right? People are free to have the vaccination, people are free to wear a mask, people are free to do whatever they want, right? But I think, if you look back, the idea that people shouldn't be forcebly injected with medical things that they don't wish to have came out in 1945 for very good fucking reason. Very good reason. And the fact that that became a controversial thing to say... No! No, no, no. People came together in Nuremberg for a very good reason and decided we're not going to let this happen again. And the fact that people were willing to just completely overlook that. This is the thing, they flip everything on its head."

"Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists."

"We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists."

"The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree."

"What we have witnessed over the last two weeks—with enormous pro-Hamas rallies in cities like London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.—has the potential to change the immigration debate in a decisive way. It is much harder to pretend that allowing people to enter our country illegally is a moral good when you watch some of them celebrate mass murder in the streets of your capital cities."

"Western civilization has produced some of the most stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs in human history. If you consider yourself “liberal” or even “progressive,” it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism."

"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."

"[About Triggernometry and mainstream media:] We don't have a budget to employ a bunch of people to do extensive research on things or to do fact checking for us. So we can't do certain things that the mainstream media can do, and should do. The problem is the mainstream media isn't doing it either. [...] There's a really important role for the mainstream media. I just wish they'd play that role. [...] New media has its own problems. It over rewards charisma. It over rewards passion. It massively under rewards any attempts to cling to truth. It encourages people to go off in the pursuit of the most exciting take, and truth isn't always exciting. The truth is we need a vibrant ecosystem in which all of these different pieces play their own different roles, which is why I'm in favour of maximum freedom because that's when you get everybody doing their thing. Over time people who want wholesome content if you like, when it comes to fact or information or whatever, can seek it out. Because people aren't stupid."

"I think, it doesn't apply to everybody, caveat, for most women the greatest gift their partner can give them is the opportunity, if they want to be at home with the children, to do that."

"One of the things people don't say enough about free speech is "Yes, it causes harm but the harm is worth it." And we don't make that argument because it's too honest and complicated and unpleasant."

"Pavlik Morozov was murdered by his own family in retribution. But, eerily, I still catch glimpses of him in modern Western society, especially at this point in time, when we are routinely encouraged to put politics before the person, snitch on each other via government hotlines and prove our devotion to idealistic agendas."

"The reality of life under the USSR is not something most people can accurately comprehend now, because it happened before most millennials were born and thus preceded the advent of social media, which means to most of my peers it might as well never have happened at all."

"If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it’s that subscribing to someone else’s ideology will always inevitably mean having to suspend your own judgment about right and wrong to appease your tribe. I refuse to do so."

"This is why so few Russians are rarely, if ever, progressive liberals. They are too busy dealing with the harsh realities of life, such as having to pay the rent or feed their children on a shoestring budget, to partake in self-righteousness and identity politics."

"If anything, free speech is the kryptonite of fascism, regardless of whether it stems from the left or the right. It’s the ultimate disinfectant for bad ideas. Tellingly, this is often why these people are happy to limit free speech: because, beneath all the bluster and virtue-signalling, they have flimsy arguments that collapse under the lightest touch of critical analysis. So, instead of making their ideas more robust—which is what most people would do—they put down debate altogether and hope it goes away."

"Put simply, suppression of free speech is a symptom of tyranny."

"If the right loses the ability to say what it wishes, then that’s a loss for the left as well, because sooner or later that restriction is going to hit them. That’s a mistake that the millennial left tend to make. They think they’re always going to be in a position of calling the shots and making the rules, because they’re so right-on and woke. They think a climate of fear isn’t going to affect them, because they always have the correct opinions, but this is a huge mistake. It’s like young people thinking that they’re always going to be young."

"This whole idea that the only reason people keep nattering on about free speech is that they want to use racist language and promote bigotry—that’s ignorant."

"She then adds that the primary motivation for contemporary censorship isn’t shielding people from ‘mean’ words but exercising power. ‘It feels good to tell people what to do. These people think they’re motivated by virtue, but the thrill isn’t doing good; it’s authoritarian: pushing people around and punishing them when they step out of line. It’s a predatory sport, and getting people sacked is one of the things you do on social media…and now in the mainstream media.’"

"Modern life has become Orwellian and—in many ways—we’re all 1984’s Winston Smith now."

"Soviet citizens, including my great-grandparents, who made statements that were regarded as problematic by the authorities, were told, ‘Comrade, this may be factually correct but it is politically incorrect.’ In other words, political correctness originates from the desire to suppress the truth in order to protect and advance the prevailing political narrative of the day. How things haven’t changed!"

"As a rule, the more outward ‘diversity’ an institution has, the more political uniformity there usually is among the people within it. This is because those calling for ‘diversity’ don’t really want dissimilarity or opposing views. They just want certain groups to be promoted over others, and straight, white men taken down a peg. Never the other way around."

"Hand in hand with this new linguistic spin on diversity comes ‘inclusion’, which is another word that has been bastardised in recent years. Spaces, we are told, must now be made more inclusive in order for them to be healthy. However, on entering such a space, you’ll soon discover that some people are more included than others."

"In fact, those responsible for setting up particularly ‘inclusive’ spaces frequently ask certain people to leave in order to ensure ‘safety’. Safety, you see, also has a new meaning based primarily around not having to be confronted with different opinions and beliefs (as opposed to physical threat, which is the sole ‘safety’ issue everyone cared about until five minutes ago)."

"Here’s an idea: why don’t we all stop telling other people how they should refer to themselves and mind our own damn business?"

"If your goal is to force people to accept your unsubstantiated views you have to change the meaning of words. The purpose of newspeak is to create wrongthink."

"Ultimately, they know that for a stable society to exist, there must be a common language that everyone uses to communicate on the same basis of understanding. This is no good to radicals who thrive on conflict, because without societal infighting they cannot offer their agenda in the guise of a solution. This is why they stoke division through words and meaning."

"This chapter is a plea from the heart to journalists—please stop fucking with the media. It is not yours to co-opt or use to spread propaganda. You are merely stewards of the industry."

"In his best-selling book Love for Imperfect Things, Zen Buddhist teacher Haemin Sunim proves that things don’t need to be faultless in order for them to be good or adored. They can be cherished and retain their inherent value in spite of their failings, much like human beings themselves."

"Over the past century, socialism and/or communism has been attempted in more than two dozen places… None of them has succeeded. OK, some might have failed more spectacularly than other, but none of them has triumphed, at least not for more than a few months in the early stages. Why? Because, for all of capitalism’s flaws, radical socialism and communism—which are essentially two cheeks of the same arse—do not work in practice. They sound good and worthy, but they cannot withstand the ultimate stress-test of life."

"The students had every right to set their own rules, but I had the right to say their rules were stupid and make fun of them."

"George Carlin, probably the world’s greatest-ever comedian, once said that the comedian’s job is to find the line and then cross it."

"The message I was given was clear: there is only one acceptable way of telling jokes and, if you don’t conform to it, then you should expect your career to die. It was all very, very Soviet."

"The big difference between those ‘alternative’ comedians and today’s activists is that the former actually pushed against the establishment. They challenged the formula and rewrote the rules, whereas modern-day wokeness is the establishment. It sets the rules and enforces the punishments. Every major comedy agent, TV commissioner and producer is looking for the next woke act, preferably one who ticks as many diversity boxes as possible. This isn’t a bottom-up revolution; it’s a totalitarian cult in which people with power tell everyone else what they can and can’t joke about."

"But it’s not only comics who are self-censoring: increasing numbers of audience members are filing complaints against venues for allowing acts to ‘upset’ them. Years ago, such people would’ve been laughed out of town and told to grow up, but these days they’re taken seriously."

"Many comedians I’ve spoken to agree that this kind of entitled, moralistic response is more commonplace than ever before. Perhaps it’s related to what psychologists have identified as a general escalation of narcissistic behaviour. Or maybe it’s an inevitable by-product of social media, through which offence-seeking has turned into a kind of amateur sport."

"It was a complete overreaction and disconnected from reality, but that’s the norm."

"If you’ve ever wondered why comedians—the very people who are supposed to push boundaries and challenge dogma—would embrace the cozy conformity of wokeness, then allow me to explain: it’s fundamentally about power. It’s not about making people laugh any more, it’s about securing the reins of cultural power, which to a large degree they have already done."

"Just as journalists have turned into activists, so too have comedians. Not all, but a large number. They have morphed into representatives of a political agenda and they’ll censor anyone who doesn’t help them further it. They don’t want to criticise what you do or what you say or engage in debate; that would be a waste of time. They simply want to punish you, silence you and achieve their political goals by any means necessary."

"Perhaps most importantly of all, comedy is a by-product of the West and its virtues. Think about it: do you really think there’s much cutting-edge comedy going on in Afghanistan, China or Crimea? How about Venezuela, Libya or Kazakhstan? The answer is no. This is because comedy stems from freedom; it is representative of unfettered expression and open dialogue. To try and clip comedy’s wings is profoundly anti-Western—but then again, maybe that’s the whole point."

"Other than a handful of lunatics who advocate the idea of open borders, most of us understand that there is a sensible level of immigration which, when exceeded, becomes disruptive to existing communities. This, in turn, does everyone a disservice, including the immigrants themselves."

"My point is that the overwhelming majority of the things that are now described as ‘racism’, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘bigotry’ are simply a product of the fact that we now see everything through the prism of race. I was lucky to be denied the opportunity to do so."

"As American philosopher Eric Hoffer famously wrote, ‘Every great cause starts as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.’ Diversity has long ceased being a noble cause. It’s been a business for some time and is now rapidly becoming a government-funded, media-supported, propaganda-driven, shameless racket. So many people are now aware of this that even the diversity hustlers have had to change the word—they call it ‘representation’ now. This is why any conversation about immigration immediately becomes a toxic, fact-free zone of hyperventilation—their livelihoods are at stake."

"Are they really trying to tell me to pack my things and fuck off back to Russia? From everything I am told, and everything I see on social media, I can only deduce that I would be better off elsewhere. Weirdly, none of the people who tell you how evil, bigoted, racist and sexist the West is ever move to any of the other ‘much better’ countries—but maybe they want me to?"

"I was obviously born Russian, but I had no control over that. However, when I got the freedom to choose my life, I gave my old life up for the West, which is the only real ‘privilege’ I truly have. It’s certainly the only one that matters. In doing so I’ve built a life for myself here that’s far better, much safer and more more rewarding than anything I could’ve had anywhere else."

"The radical left is the home of the unhappy—and how best to create more miserable people than to break down the roots that give us security, stability and fulfilment?"

"The Qurān is one of the world’s classics which cannot be translated without grave loss. It has a rhythm of peculiar beauty and a cadence that charms the ear. Many Christian Arabs speak of its style with warm admiration, and most Arabists acknowledge its excellence… indeed it may be affirmed that within the literature of the Arabs, wide and fecund as it is both in poetry and in elevated prose, there is nothing to compare with it."

"[On coming to terms with having bowel cancer] I literally got to the point where I listed the pros and cons of everything that had happened to me: leaving Sri Lanka; finding Fran [Frances Robathan, his wife] and falling in love with her at Durham; my career. I added up all of those things and then the bad things that had happened and I just realised in a very visual way, boy, I had had a lot of happiness. There was a lot more in the column of the good things that had happened to me than the shit things that had happened to me. And it was effective. I thought, "Well, let's see what happens." I grew up in a house in Colombo where there was a bucket for a loo and a man came and emptied it out, and I ended up where I am now. It's a good journey, a very good journey. I'm really careful about saying things like this. There are as many ways of dealing with cancer as there are people who have got it, and you've got to find the one that works for you, but for me thinking of things in that way was the key. Ever since, I've been able to deal with — well, some really tough medicine this week, for example. And what is really important is that I love life so much more to the point, I love the people around me so much that I will give it everything I possibly can to hang in there rather than say, "I've had a good life; let bad things happen.""

"One of my happiest memories of George will forever be his 60th birthday party. All his sisters were there and Fran and their very handsome boys. There was nothing “celebby” about it. It was the people that meant a lot to him, gathered in one place, to celebrate an incredibly important moment – a moment he didn't necessarily think he would live to see. George made a speech, as did the boys, and it was incredibly moving and life affirming all at the same time."

"George was a man of great empathy. In the newsroom he was adored and admired by the team of producers behind the scenes. He was a true team player. He wanted to listen to everyone's opinion and never assumed he was right. A man without ego - unusual in the TV world - he never wanted the story to be about him. And then, suddenly, it was."

"What we generally fall to realize is that in talking today to the IndIans we are face to face with the direct descendants, as often as not, of people who were contemporaries of Ancient Egypt, and whose present culture, in most of its mam essentials, is nearly the same as It was then, and is in any event directly descended from that age, and even possibly before it."

"Living in Zaire from its neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville. The tower was a medley of gleaming metal tubes and concrete pillars, and its raison d’être was a bit of a mystery: It wasn't particularly beautiful, had been left unfinished for decades, and couldn't be visited. That ambiguity was fitting. The Limete Tower, as it was called, was an exercise in presidential hypocrisy, and a half-hearted one at that. Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's long-ruling dictator, had commissioned it to commemorate his former boss and onetime friend Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo. Lumumba was assassinated in January 1961 with the collusion of Western powers worried about his suspected Communist sympathies and determined to keep him from power. In theory, the monument was meant to glorify a national hero, a martyr to imperialism. But the gesture's sincerity was open to question, because Mobutu himself helped ensure Lumumba's death, ordering him to be flown handcuffed to a secessionist province where he was shot by firing squad, his body then dismembered and dissolved in acid."

"In Sharifabad the dogs distinguished clearly between Moslem and Zoroastrian, and were prepared to go, with a diffident politeness but full of hope, into a crowded Zoroastrian assembly, or to fall asleep trustfully in a Zoroastrian lane, but would flee as before Satan from a group of Moslem boys. Moslems are not, of course, invariably unkind to dogs. Some themselves own herd- or watch-dogs, and apart from this there are naturally many Moslems who would not deliberately harm any creature. But undeniably there are others who are savagely and wantonly cruel to dogs, on the pretext that Muhammad called them unclean; but there seems no factual basis for this, and the evidence points rather to Moslem hostility to these animals having been deliberately fostered in the first place in Iran, as a point of opposition to the old faith there. Certainly in the Yazdi area na-najib Moslems found a double satisfaction in tormenting dogs, since they were thereby both afflicting an unclean creature and causing distress to the infidel who cherished him. There are grim old stories from the time when the annual poll-tax was exacted, of the tax gatherer tying a Zoroastrian and a dog together, and flogging both alternately until the money was somehow forthcoming, or death released them. I myself was spared any worse sight than that of a young Moslem girl in Mazra' Kalantar standing over a litter of two-week old puppies, and suddenly kicking one as hard as she could with her shod foot. The puppy screamed with pain, but at my angry intervention she merely said blankly, ‘But it’s unclean.’ In Sharifabad I was told by distressed Zoroastrian children of worse things: a litter of puppies cut to pieces with a spade-edge, and a dog’s head laid open with the same implement; and occasionally the air was made hideous with the cries of some tormented animal. Such wanton cruelties on the Moslems’ part added not a little to the tension between the communities."

"“…in the mid nineteenth century disaster overtook Turkabad, in the shape of what was perhaps the last massed forcible conversion in Iran. It no longer seems possible to learn anything about the background of this event; but it happened, so it is said, one autumn day when dye-madder – then one of the chief local crops – was being lifted. All the able-bodied men were at work in teams in the fields when a body of Moslems swooped on the village and seized them. They were threatened, not only with death for themselves, but also with the horrors that would befall their women and children, who were being terrorized at the same time in their homes; and by the end of the day of violence most of the village had accepted Islam. To recant after a verbal acknowledgement of Allah and his prophet meant death in those days, and so Turkabad was lost to the old religion. Its fire-temple was razed to the ground, and only a rough, empty enclosure remained where once it had stood."

"A similar fate must have overtaken many Iranian villages in the past, among those which did not willingly embrace Islam; and the question seems less why it happened to Turkabad than why it did not overwhelm all other Zoroastrian settlements. The evidence, scanty though it is, shows, however, that the harassment of the Zoroastrians of Yazd tended to be erratic and capricious, being at times less harsh, or bridled by strong governors; and in general the advance of Islam across the plain, through relentless, seems to have been more by slow erosion than by furious force. The process was still going on in the 1960s, and one could see, therefore, how it took effect. Either a few Moslems settled on the outskirts of a Zoroastrian village, or one or two Zoroastrian families adopted Islam. Once the dominant faith had made a breach, it pressed in remorselessly, like a rising tide. More Moslems came, and soon a small mosque was built, which attracted yet others. As long as Zoroastrians remained in the majority, their lives were tolerable; but once the Moslems became the more numerous, a petty but pervasive harassment was apt to develop. This was partly verbal, with taunts about fire-worship, and comments on how few Zoroastrians there were in the world, and how many Moslems, who must therefore posses the truth; and also on how many material advantages lay with Islam. The harassment was often also physical; boys fought, and gangs of youth waylaid and bullied individual Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the local tower of silence and desecrating it, and they might even break into the fire-temple and seek to pollute or extinguish the sacred flame. Those with criminal leanings found too that a religious minority provided tempting opportunities for theft, pilfering from the open fields, and sometimes rape and arson. Those Zoroastrians who resisted all these pressures often preferred therefore in the end to sell out and move to some other place where their co-religionists were still relatively numerous, and they could live at peace; and so another village was lot to the old faith. Several of the leading families in Sharifabad and forebears who were driven away by intense Moslem pressure from Abshahi, once a very devout and orthodox village on the southern outskirts of Yazd; and a shorter migration had been made by the family of the centenarian ‘Hajji’ Khodabakhsh, who had himself been born in the 1850s and was still alert and vigorous in 1964. His family, who were very pious, had left their home in Ahmedabad (just to the north of Turkabad) when he was a small boy, and had come to settle in Sharifabad to escape persecution and the threats to their orthodox way of life. Other Zoroastrians held out there for a few decades longer, but by the end of the century Ahmedabad was wholly Moslem, as Abshahi become in 1961. [The last Zoroastrian family left Abshahi in 1961, after the rape and subsequent suicide of one of their daughters.] It was noticeable that the villages which were left to the Zoroastrians were in the main those with poor supplies of water, where farming conditions were hard.”"

"The original name of the Indo/Iranian Goddess was Sarasvati ‘she who possesses waters’. In India she continued to be worshipped by this name which she gave to a small but very holy river in Madhyadesa (Punjab) whereas in Iran Sarasvati became, by normal sound changes Harahvati, a name preserved in the region called in Avestan Harakhvaiti and known to the Greeks as Anacosia, a region rich in rivers and lakes. Originally, Harahvaiti was the personification of the great river which flows down from the high Hara into the sea Vourukasa and is the source of the waters of the world, and just as the wandering Iranians called the great mountains near which they lived Hara, they gave Harahvaitis name to the life giving rivers and their Indian cousins did the same."

"I learned that Bharat is the most ancient source of living wisdom (spirituality) and that it has always generated its revelations world wide."

"But science fiction’s entanglement with theology goes far deeper... Writers in this genre explore the consequences of technological innovation for human communities and individual human lives, whether those consequences are intentional or accidental, emotional or economic. They consider the impact that scientific theories and concepts have had on our understandings of what it means to be human, and on the limits of individual human identity. They examine how the characteristics that make us human (big brains, tool-making hands) might also lead to the end of humanity, either with a bang (“Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”) or a whimper (“Day of the Triffids”) or both (“Threads,” “The Day After”). As such, science fiction asks its audiences not just who they think they are, but who they want to be. It creates visions both of the world as it could be and as it must not be allowed to be, with science and technology together building the future of faith."

"Theology and science have got a lot in common. For one thing, they’re often considered too hard, or too abstract, for ordinary people to understand. Their study is — apparently — reserved to those rare brains who can understand the complexity of the natural or social world. Ordinary people can only begin to understand a simplified version of these subjects. But despite this stereotype, both subjects also form part of our common human heritage, helping us to ask and answer key questions about what makes up the world around us, as well as how and why it works. (2022)"

"Every time we think about the past, we rewrite history as part of bringing a moral order to the present. (2021)"

"The Russian command knew that by winning the Russia had, in effect, won the war."

"Between 1980 and 2005, I commissioned working scientists to write for The Guardian newspaper — from astronomers royal to impoverished doctoral students — and almost all of them delivered high-standard, well-focused newspaper prose and many of them went on to live by the pen. I also encountered distinguished scientists who had already become literary stars. One was the astronomer Carl Sagan, who told me that his literary hero was Thomas Henry Huxley. Another was the industrial chemist, poet and writer Primo Levi, who when I tried to ask him about the Two Cultures debate — the apparent divide between the humanities and sciences — gently reminded me that Dante Alighieri (himself the subject of at least one paper in Nature), was a member of the Florentine guild of physicians and apothecaries. And a third was the Czech poet and dissident , who wrote his occasional Guardian column in English, and asked that at the end of each I describe him as the author of Immunology of Nude Mice (1989). All three were better writers than most writers: two will still be famous as writers a century from now."

"Modern European and Asian people may owe more than skin or hair colour to ancestry. 50,000 years ago between two species of human may also have bequeathed a sunburn hazard called , to , and a greater risk of . That the forebears of modern ‘’’’ and the long-extinct Neanderthals lived side by side is well known: that they interbred, and that up to 4% of modern human DNA is inherited from the first Europeans, was confirmed only in 2010."

"Far below the , between Israel, Jordan and , researchers have found evidence of a that has no precedent in human experience. From depths of 300 metres below the landlocked basin, drillers brought to the surface a core that contained 30 metres of thick, crystalline salt: evidence that 120,000 years ago, and again about 10,000 years ago, had been only about one fifth of modern levels. The cause in each case would have been entirely natural. But in the region where human civilisation began, already in the grip of its worst drought for 900 years, it is a reminder of how bad things could get and a guide to how much worse human-induced climate change could become."

"The s which often accompany fishing s are there for anything but philanthropic purposes. They float about among the ducks keeping a sharp eye on them, and no sooner does one appear with a fish than they flap over the wretched bird's head and so harry it that, quite often, the catch is dropped and the gulls devour it."

"... All large sociable birds make noticeable preparations when about to take wing, and some of these initiating movements have no apparent usefulness so far as rising from the ground or water is concerned. ... It is of great advantage to birds which migrate in flocks, such as geese, to take flight so far as possible simultaneously, and thus range themselves without delay into orderly squadrons. Moreover, the movements serve as a quiet hint of danger to neighbors when a bird sights a suspicious object. They have, in fact, a contagious effect. Large gaggles of geese in which one or other of the birds is constantly initiating flight in this way fly up much more often than small parties."

"Some birds which feed on insects may bring food to the nest more than a thousand times in one day."

"There is nothing in Shakespeare's writings to suggest that he knew the . In his day the word "chough" was synonymous with . Looking over the Dover cliffs he might have seen jackdaws, but is not likely to have seen crows. A close study of his ornithology has convinced me that personal observation played a very minor part, while traditional symbolism and folk-lore bulked large in his imagination. Incidentally, there is no indication of a personal acquaintance with any sea-bird. He mentions the but only as the symbol of greed. For what it is worth this negative evidence suggests that, contrary to the speculations of and other writers, Shakespeare had not much knowledge of the sea."

"… bore twin children, Apollo and Artemis, who had a sanctuary in common at Troy (Il. v. 445-448). Apollo also had twins by the Cretan woman . —another form of Leto—laid two eggs after consorting with Jupiter. Out of one came , out of the other and Helena."

"Those who would follow Christ must neither be unduly frightened by what is involved, nor rush into commitments which they will be unable to fulfil."

"A rich store of Christian s appeared throughout the centuries before the time of Saint Francis, and he was by no means the first saint to show compassion for animals; but the blossoming of Christian compassion for nature in the thirteenth century and the , taken for granted by most writers, require explanation. Prior to his appearance, Italy had not been fertile in stories, true or apocryphal, telling of men and animals on friendly terms with one another, nor were Italians then any more renowned than they are now for their kindly treatment of birds and beasts. Why, then, should there have accumulated in connexion with a humble n friar a galaxy of stories of this kind?"

"... Alexander the Great was said to have been guided across the desert to the by two ravens from heaven which encouraged stragglers with their croaking."

"The , , and some s retain territory in winter and pair after occupying territory. Other species which abandon their breeding territories and flock in winter form pairs before they establish territory (Gibb 1956a)."

"On the whole, the first-rate have the most elaborate equipment. The birds with the most s and greatest ability to move the tend to produce the greatest variety of sounds."

"While teaching again, Brown soon realised that the same racism that she had fought in her home country was also prevalent in the UK. This was the awakening of a new goal – to fight the racism, sexism, and classism that was deeply entrenched in the British education system and wider society."

"So many of us have loved her dearly, been inspired by her virtues, benefited from her friendship, kindness and generosity, and regarded her as a trailblazer in so many things – her stand against apartheid, racism and injustice of all kinds; her service to education and gender rights; her compassion for humanity. She is in our hearts and thoughts and will be remembered as a fine human being as a very dear friend."

"Babette Brown came to the UK after she was forced into political exile due to her opposition to Apartheid. The author of several books on early learning and child development, at the age of 70, she went on to found Persona Dolls, making dolls of many different ethnicities and types, who would tell their stories through a teacher. Children were then encouraged to offer advice and solutions to the experiences a doll describes. This practical and non-threatening approach to dealing with difficult issues has proved especially effective with children. Her charity, established in the 2000s, produce the dolls in South Africa. Thousands of teachers globally are now trained to use the Persona Dolls approach."

"Although she didn’t win we were very satisfied, simply with the nomination, and we happily relaxed with another glass of wine content that Babette would have been so proud that her anti-racist work with young children, through Persona Doll Training, was being acknowledged.""

""Just as the nominations for all the categories were finished to our utter astonishment Babette’s face filled the screen again and it was announced that she had WON a special CHAIRMAN’S AWARD for her work with Persona Doll Training. Shocked, my brother, Peter Brown and I approached the stage to collect her award."

"... is, to many people, not primarily a belief in facts at all. It is in a sense a very much simpler thing; but it is a thing less capable of analysis, because more deeply rooted, more elemental. It is that trust or confidence in Christ which contact with Him (or, if you will, with ) inspires."

"National culture may some day give place to cosmopolitan culture, but meantime it is a richer and intenser thing. The poetry of a nation, for instance, gains more from the deep roots of national memory and tradition than it loses from the political boundaries which fence it from the air and sun that might come to it across neighbouring gardens. The whole gains by the fuller development of every one of its parts."

"The landlords' land was seized in in the summer of 1917—that is, during the , and before the Communists came into power. I was told afterwards that by October of that year there was a single great estate left in the But it appears that the formal allocation of the land did not take place until after the . With the land, the stock and implements (inventar) were distributed also."

"Every time we eat, we have the power to radically transform the world we live in and simultaneously contribute to addressing many of the most pressing issues that our species currently faces: climate change, infectious disease, chronic disease, human exploitation and, of course, non-human exploitation. Every single day, our choices can help alleviate all of these problems or they can perpetuate them."

"We have created a form of tyranny over the natural world, pillaging, extracting, using and destroying as we please. We have placed ourselves above the ecological life support systems that our species depends on for survival and exploited them for our own short-term benefit, cutting down forests and polluting rivers and oceans. We have destroyed millions of years of evolution in the blink of an eye, quite literally bulldozing our way around this finite planet. For all of our intelligence, we have still failed to grasp the simple reality that we need the planet more than the planet needs us."

"People often call vegans extremists, and yet veganism is merely living by the principle that if I am against cruelty then I will do what I can to avoid perpetuating systems that cause physical and mental harm to animals. It is a clear indictment of how ingrained our state of cognitive dissonance is that we see attempts at moral consistency as signs of extremism. Is it not strange that we call those who kill dogs animal abusers, those who kill pigs normal and those who kill neither extremists? Is it not odd that someone who smashes a car window to rescue a dog on a hot day is viewed as a hero but someone who rescues a piglet suffering on a farm is a criminal?"

"It is ironic that we often believe that empathy and complex emotions only really exist in humans but we then fail to empathise with the animals who suffer at our hands."

"Veganism will come about as a result of the traits in humans that we are most proud of – ingenuity, intellectual honesty, progressiveness and self-reflection – while rejecting many of the traits that are most damaging – stubbornness, wilful ignorance, violence, selfishness and apathy. We are already seeing this in action, and though getting accurate population statistics is challenging, a clear theme is being revealed by polling and surveys: veganism is growing."

"Russians, like the rest of us, prefer to believe that their history has progressed in a straight and positive line. They explain away troubling events – such as the brutal reigns of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin – as necessary stages on the path to greatness."

"The Russians are fascinating, ingenious, creative, sentimental, warm-hearted, generous, obstinately courageous, endlessly tough, often devious, brutal and ruthless. Ordinary Russians firmly believe that they are warmer-hearted than others, more loyal to their friends, more willing to sacrifice themselves for the common good, more devoted to the fundamental truths of life. They give the credit to the Russian soul, as broad and all-embracing as the Russian land itself. Their passionate sense of Russia’s greatness is paradoxically undermined by an underlying and corrosive pessimism. And it is tempered by resentment that their country is insufficiently understood and respected by foreigners."

"Russia has not yet lost its imperial itch. Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine has postponed for many decades the prospect that Russia will become the modern democratic state at peace with its neighbours, which so many courageous Russians had fought so hard to create. But no people should ever be written off beyond redemption. I hang on to the golden image of the firebird which fleets through the dark forests of the Russian folklore to symbolise the hope that Russia will see better days."

"The enjoys such , and so much authority as to be almost a king in his inland territory. By his manorial rights he receives tithes of corn, apples, and lambs, he presides over the petty court which assembles three times a year, called, The Chief Pleas, at which, though he has no vote, yet his veto, or consent is necessary to all their decisions. By virtue of his patent (which however he never exerts,) he can prevent the building of any house without his leave, or the solemnization of any marriage without his consent, and the of the island is also in his gift."

", tittle-tattle, tale-bearing, are the very bindweed of society; as the bindweed destroys the flower, so do they choke every kindly feeling and every noble thought."

"THE ISLAND OF , separated from by , is not inhabited, except by rabbits burrowing in the heath, the wild bee in its rose-leaf cell, and the which rests and lives on its rocks. The late Governor, , to whom the belonged, built a cottage on it to shelter the fisherman or shipwrecked mariner; but it has fallen into decay. The stormy petrel, rarely found on the British coast, may be taken here with the hand; but it has the singular defence of ejecting a fetid fluid from its bill when alarmed or hurt, which often saves it from capture."

"All our farinaceous plants contain abundance of , especially wheat, barley, oats, maize, rice, ; and the s differ from each other in size and form so decidedly, that they cannot well be mistaken by a careful observer. They are prepared for the microscope, and sold as polariscope objects, because the examination of a starch granule with shows it with a beautiful black cross, revolving with the polarizer; or, if over a selenite stage, a brilliant play of colours is obtained."

"There is felt by many seaside ramblers a want of some unscientific, easy to the s and contents of s on the English coast. There are most valuable works by }} and }} on the subject, but more expensive and more scientific than suits the minds of those who seek for health and rest in the sweet summer months by the seaside. To supply that want I purpose describing the Seaweeds, not exactly in the order arranged by Algælogists (though a systematic aid is given for the use of Collectors); but, taking the coast anywhere as a book, opening and closing as the great sea ebbs and flows, I shall begin with the first-tide pools, and find interest for my readers until the next range is uncovered, and more objects may be found. Then we shall take advantage of a gale of wind, and see what the waves cast up from depths unattainable by mortal hand."

"... books, like Louisa Lane Clarke's The Microscope (1858) and 's A World of Wonders Revealed by the Microscope (1859), were directed to broader audiences in a drive to recruit more new microscopists from the general public."

"Peter James wrote as recently as 2012, ‘scientists and archaeologists are still learning how to apply the radiocarbon method properly.’"

"Centuries of Darkness was particularly critical of modern Egyptologists. ‘Early Egyptologists were usually more tentative about their chronology, continually revising their opinions in the light of fresh evidence. Sadly the study of Egyptian chronology seems to have become so ossified that it cannot question its fundamental assumptions, accepted more for familiarity than for any basis in fact.’"

"The Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old custom."

"Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end in itself since the middle class would always had ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won. The bureaucracy and officer corps had to be eliminated. What was needed, in fact, was not just an uprising as demanded by the Bolsheviks but a commitment to a struggle to 'make the revolution permanent'."

"The Soviet communist leadership may have magnified the prospects of 'European revolution' but it did not invent them out of nothing. Country after country to the west of Russia was experiencing disorder and discontent. Russia itself emerged under Bolshevik rule from years of civil war and foreign armed intervention. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. The Western Allies had not had properly agreed strategic aims since at least 1917, when America joined them."

"I'm English, so obviously do not have a philosophy. I am a Christian, though, if you want to know about important beliefs."

"Attila the Hun remains to this day a byword for savagery and destruction. His is one of the few names from antiquity that still prompt instant recognition, putting him alongside the likes of Alexander, Caesar, Cleopatra and Nero. Attila has become the barbarian of the ancient world."

"It is widely believed that Christianity remained an essentially urban cult and that the population of the countryside clung for generations to the old beliefs. The word 'pagan' comes from paganus, or someone who lived in the countryside (pagus). Unfortunately, we know so little about the religious life in rural areas that this remains conjectural. Paganus was usually derogatory – something like 'yokel' or 'hick' would give the right idea – and may just reflect the common belief of urban dwellers that countrymen were dull and backward."

"On 2 August 216 BC the Carthaginian General Hannibal won one of the most complete battlefield victories in history. Outnumbered nearly two to one, his heterogeneous army of Africans, Spaniards and Celts not merely defeated, but virtually destroyed the Roman army opposing them....The scale of the losses at Cannae was unrivalled until the industrialised slaughter of the First World War."

"Most battles from the Ancient World are now all but forgotten, for military as well as civil education has ceased to be based fundamentally on the Classics. Yet Cannae is still regularly referred to in the training programmes of today's army officers. Hannibal's tactics appear almost perfect, the classic example of double envelopment, and ever since many commanders have attempted to reproduce their essence and their overwhelming success. Nearly all have failed."

"Hannibal won the battle through not only his dynamic leadership and the high quality of his army, but also because of a good deal of luck. Cannae was not an exercise in pure tactics, but, like all battles, a product both of the military doctrines and technology of the time and the peculiar circumstances of a specific campaign."

"It was very difficult to disable an opponent with a single blow; either a heavy strike to the head, a massive thrust past shield and through any armour to the body, or a hit on the leg breaking the bone and causing the victim to fall. Attempting to deliver such a strong cut or thrust exposed the attacker to greater risk of wounding, especially as his right arm, and perhaps part of his right side, lost the protection of his shield. It was less risky to deliver weaker attacks to the unprotected extremities of an opponent, even though this was unlikely to kill him quickly."

"The Roman legion was supposed to operate with wide gaps between its maniples and significant intervals between each of the three lines. The openness of its formation allowed the legion to advance without falling into disorder even over comparatively rough terrain. It is impossible, even for well drilled troops, to march in a perfectly straight line, and the more uneven the terrain, the more probable that a unit will veer to one side or the other. The wide intervals between the maniples of the legion allowed them to cope with such deviation without units colliding and merging together and ceasing to be independent tactical entities. The unusual formation adopted by the Roman infantry at Cannae sacrificed this openness and with it most of the flexibility of the manipular system."

"Hasdrubal had led his close order cavalry in a devastatingly brutal charge against the Roman right wing, shattering and virtually destroying it in a brief pursuit. The Carthaginian had kept his men under tight control and, when they had rested and reformed, he led them behind the Roman main line, moving against Varro on the left, and ignoring the massed infantry in the enemy centre. Varro's allied horsemen were still engaged in their stand-off with the Numidians, but the sight of the lines of Hasdrubal's Gauls and Spaniards approaching from the rear utterly shattered their spirit. Without waiting for the Carthaginians to charge home, the Roman left wing dissolved into a panicked flight in which the consul joined. Their position was untenable, and, if they had in fact formed with their flank on the hills around Cannae, any delay in flight might have resulted in their being trapped. They could not have won any combat with a more numerous enemy attacking from two sides, but their flight sealed the fate of the Roman army."

"There is a nightmarish quality about many of the descriptions of the aftermath of Cannae....Later sources would invent further horrors, claiming that Hannibal bridged the River Aufidius with Roman corpses. The reality of Cannae was probably even more appalling than such horrific inventions, for it remains one of the bloodiest single day's fighting in history, rivalling the massed slaughter of the British Army on the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916."

"Although he paid attention to the effectiveness of the Roman military system, Polybius believed that Rome's success rested far more on its political system. For him the Republic's constitution, which was carefully balanced to prevent any one individual or section of society from gaining overwhelming control, granted Rome freedom from the frequent revolution and civil strife that had plagued most Greek city-states. Internally stable, the Roman Republic was able to devote itself to waging war on a scale and with a relentlessness unmatched by any rival. It is doubtful that any other contemporary state could have survived the catastrophic losses and devastation inflicted by Hannibal, and still gone on to win the war."

"Lucius Cornelius Sulla was a man of striking appearance, with exceptionally fair skin, piercing grey eyes and reddish hair. In later life his appearance was marred by a skin condition that speckled his face with red patches. (An obscure piece of military law from several centuries later also claims that he had only one testicle, and that his achievements make it clear that such a defect was no bar to becoming a successful soldier.) Sulla could be very charming, winning over soldier and senator alike, but many aristocrats remained deeply uncertain of him. In spite of his late entry into public life he had been reasonably successful, and demonstrated his military skill on repeated occasions. His consulship came when he was fifty, which was unusually old for a first term, and in the preceding decade it had taken two attempts for him to win the praetorship. Many senators probably found it hard to forget the poverty of his youth and the decay of his family. It is common for those who flourish under any system to feel that the failure of others is deserved. Sulla had been poor and revelled in the company of actors and musicians, professions considered extremely disreputable. Such behaviour was bad enough in his youth, and far worse for a senator and magistrate, but Sulla remained loyal to his old friends throughout his life. He was a heavy drinker, enjoyed feasting and was widely believed to be very active sexually, taking both men and women as lovers. For much of his life he publicly associated with the actor Metrobius, who specialised in playing female roles on stage, and the pair were believed to be having an affair."

"Roman laws tended to be long and complex — one of Rome's most enduring legacies to the world is cumbersome and tortuous legal prose."

"The Ptolemies were Macedonians, with an admixture of a little Greek and via marriage with the Seleucids a small element of Syrian blood. (There is no evidence to make us question the paternity of any of the line and suggest that they were the product of an illicit liaison between the queen and a man other than her husband. This remains possible, if not very likely, but an uncertain basis for any argument.) The Macedonians were not an homogenous people and seem to have varied considerably in appearance and colouring. Alexander the Great was fair-haired, although it is always difficult to know precisely what this meant. A Roman copy of an earlier mosaic shows him with medium-brown hair. Fair might simply mean not black or very dark brown. On the other hand, several of the early Ptolemies were blond and comparisons of their hair to gold suggest this was more than simply not black-haired."

"Cleopatra may have had black, brown, blonde, or even red hair, and her eyes could have been brown, grey, green or blue. Almost any combination of these is possible. Similarly, she may have been very light skinned or had a darker more Mediterranean complexion. Fairer skin is probably marginally more likely given her ancestry."

"There were no political parties at Rome as we would understand them, nor were elections primarily contests about policy. Quite openly, voters selected on the basis of perceived character and past behaviour rather than the views a candidate expressed. Where an individual's nature was not obvious, the Roman people tended to be drawn to a famous name, for there was a sense that virtue and ability were inherited."

"When Crassus left for his province he was hounded by a tribune who formally called on the gods to curse the proconsul and the unjust war he planned. Personal hatreds and rivalry loomed larger in most senators' minds than the good of the Republic."

"Augustus pursued power relentlessly and then clung to it, whatever he might pretend in public. Such ambition is surely the hallmark of any successful political leader – and no doubt plenty of less successful ones. Yet in his case he made use of that power for the common good. He worked hard to make the res publica function again, and we cannot deny that he succeeded, since the peace and stability he imposed brought ever greater levels of prosperity. At a basic level more people were better-off under his principate than they had been for several generations. The concerns he dealt with were traditional ones, even if some of his methods were innovative. Julius Caesar had tried to address several of these issues, as had others, but none had the chance to deal with them as thoroughly as Augustus. In the process he made sure that it was well known that he was working for the common good, but once again such advertising was what any Roman politician would have done. By doing favours for individuals and whole communities he placed them in his debt, and so, as so often, personal advantage was intertwined with the wider good. That does not alter the fact that he did rule well, whatever his motivation."

"'I have not heard you swear.Waste of good anger,' Ferox said without looking at him. It was something his grandfather had often said. Do not waste rage. Nurture it, cherish it and use the strength it gives. Hot anger gets a man killed. Cold anger will put the other man in the earth."

"A man who keeps asking you to trust him is always hiding something."

"Untrustworthy people tend to be selfish, which makes them simple to understand."

"I would call it inhuman cruelty if that made sense, but it cannot because it was done by men and not monsters."

"For most of the , tree cover is the normal condition. Any area below the five hundred metre contour that is left to itself and protected from vandalism, or other biotic factors, will revert to forest unless exposed to high s or ."

"... the spread of urban conditions constitutes a terrible threat until we have learned to appreciate the real necessity for in the surroundings at every stage of human life. We must realize, in all its implications, the truth that , and the full development of intellectual or spiritual life, no less than mere existence, requires contact with nature and natural beauty."

"In our soft too many s become oppressive, and we need a very carefully balanced combination of evergreen and deciduous planting to give us the right degree of comfort, variety and satisfaction. But with a brighter light and greater extremes of temperature, a much higher proportion of evergreen is felt to be right."

"Compare the appearance and social atmosphere of the average country village having a well-mixed community with those of a modern housing estate composed of all one type of house and garden. Monotony seems to make for squalor or genteel snobbery according to the class of house …"

"Brenda Colvin studied garden design at 1919–1920; set up her own practice in 1922; designed many gardens and estates, school grounds, university campus, cemeteries, also industrial landscapes, e.g. around power stations, and she published several books, including Land and Landscape ... When Colvin, together with , and others, co-founded the , she was a driving force in defining educational requirements. It seems, often Colvin first came up with the ideas (Annabel Downs, personal communication 2021). Colvin had travelled in the USA in 1931 and what she saw hugely influenced her later thinking (Gibson 2011, p. 35)."

"Our confirmation bias then leads us to seek our further information to confirm those existing views, or to reject information that challenges them."

"Our views are constantly being shaped by through the negotiation between our own identity, our group loyalty, and our relationship to wider society."

"Without salience or social cues climate change sits outside the analytic frame that we apply to make sense of the world around us."

"where George II died and where Queen Victoria was born is still used as apartments for the sovereign's relatives: Princess Margaret, the , and . The State Apartments and suite occupied by Princess Victoria are open."

"proposed as the chief gardener and William Brown as his assistant. Nelson had already 'sailed round the world in my service for the purpose of collecting plants and seeds and was eminently successful in the object of his mission,' wrote Banks."

"On 1 October 1918, when only sixteen, my father rode into Damascus with the , hours ahead of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and the colourful . Fighting in the sane campaign were another 100,000 soldiers including the , the only armed Jewish force fighting in Palestine for nearly 2,000 years. From their first steps on the moors of in 1917, these Jewish soldiers were trained to be part of the . After fighting alongside my father on the road to Damascus, some of these fighters went underground to eventually become founding members of Israel's biggest and most effective militia, the , which in 1948 would form the 's original army with a force in mid-May of 35,000 fighters."

"There is a that I will probably never send. I would not dare to. It is a cross of Jesus drawn in fresh blood from an animal sacrifice. Although slaughter for sacrifice contradicts a basic belief of Christianity, it is practiced by local Catholics, Greek Orthodox and other Christians at the in the village of , 20 miles from Jerusalem. "Around 70 to 80 lambs are sacrificed here each year," said the Roman Catholic priest, Father Raed. Similar sacrifices are also made in the towns of d, , and elsewhere in the Holy Land. Yet bloodless altars are a distinguishing feature of Christian churches. One of the tenets of the faith is that Jesus was the ultimate and final sacrifice. Christians atone for their sins without the shedding of blood. They look to Jesus as the who made the ancient belief in sacrifice obsolete. It is surely hypocritical of the churches to encourage millions of tourists and pilgrims to visit Jerusalem to see where Jesus Christ was crucified, but not halt this ritualised sacrifice."

"... In 1961 she trained as a newspaper reporter and was sent to London to work for the Murdoch papers on . She filed reports from all over the world and interviewed such celebrities as the Dalai Lama, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and PG Wodehouse. The Duchess was despatched on several hazardous missions – notably to war-torn Vietnam and gave a graphic account of a strike mission she flew with the carrying . In 1963, she attended a dinner for in Miami four nights before he was assassinated in Dallas. Two years later, she returned to Vietnam, and was one of the first women to write about the effects of the bombing raids launched from Danang, the top secret centre where the US stockpiled its most deadly bombs."