Sociology

"In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized."

"What would we think of an observer who published a log in which he recorded: On the 12th I saw the moon, on the 13th the sun looked very nice, the following night you could see a lot of stars (et cetera)? ... Most of our writers are moral observers of precisely that caliber, and the expert is as appalled when he reads it as an expert astronomer would be to read such a log."

"In a public, as we may understand the term,"

"A mass culture is a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual or moral effort whatsoever. ... Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.""

"Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal."

"The social sciences are granted eternal youth because findings must be revisited."

"To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without creating obviously artificial links between the two, was the principle achievement of Marx's theory. The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense."

"I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks."

"Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

"Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences."

"Comte gave a powerful impetus to the development of sociology, an impetus which bore fruit in the later decades of the nineteenth century. To say this is certainly not to claim that French sociologists such as Durkheim were devoted disciples of the high priest of positivism. But by insisting on the irreducibility of each of his basic sciences to the particular science of sciences which it presupposed in the hierarchy and by emphasizing the nature of sociology as the scientific study of social phenomena Comte put sociology on the map. To be sure, [its] beginnings can be traced back well beyond Montesquieu, for example, and to Condorcet, not to speak of Saint-Simon, Comte's immediate predecessor. But Comte's clear recognition of sociology as a particular science, with a character of its own, justified Durkheim in regarding him as the father or founder of this science, in spite of the fact that Durkheim did not accept the idea of the three states and criticized Comte's approach to sociology."

"The year was 1968, and the fact that thirty-eight-year-old Levada called himself a sociologist, and his subject sociology, was almost revolutionary. Sociology was not exactly banned in the Soviet Union, but the name of the discipline had been reduced to something like a curse word. Lenin himself had inaugurated it as a Soviet insult. The problem with sociology was much the same as with psychoanalysis: the field of study refused to be a “science” that could be used to create a new society of new men. A year before the Philosophers’ Ship sailed, one of Lenin’s closest allies, Nikolai Bukharin, published The Theory of Historical Materialism, an attempt at a sort of Marxist textbook of everything, written in a folksy language intended for the proletariat. Three things that Bukharin did in this textbook proved deadly for Soviet sociology: he included new ideas that he believed advanced Marxist theory, he subtitled it A Popular Textbook of Marxist Sociology, and he proclaimed the supreme importance of sociology among the social sciences because it “examines not some one aspect of public life but all of public life in all its complexity.” Lenin hated the book, and the word “sociology” took the brunt of his rage. He underlined it throughout the book and supplied a small variety of comments in the margins: “Haha!” “Eclectic!” “Help!” and the like. In another eight years, when Bukharin was deposed in a Party power struggle, Stalin recalled Lenin’s skepticism by describing Bukharin’s work as possessed of “the hypertrophied pretentiousness of a half-baked theoretician.” Bukharin was eventually executed. Much earlier, sociology had had to go into hiding."

"The critique of Parsons exploded sociological theory into a thousand glittering but laughably parochial fragments of nano-theories. The contemporary culture of sociology is to treat social theory as set of personal expressions of literati and pseudo-philosophers. Surveying contemporary sociological theory is like going to the art museum. There we see lots of brilliant works, each the product of an artist's imagination. Certainly there is no attempt by artists to form a unified aesthetic vision. Nor should there be. But science is not art. A science becomes mature when the efforts of all researchers are coordinated by an underlying core model. This truth is denied in contemporary sociological culture."

"Success in the sociologists' aim might lead, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, to "systems so perfect that no one would need to be good." This view forgets that men long ago committed themselves to the endeavor to control their own collective behavior, not only in the ways sanctioned by the churches but in others, by making it to men's interest to do good. And they have increasingly based the endeavor on an understanding of natural laws of human behavior, those of economics, for example. So that the question is not: Shall this kind of control be undertaken? but: Where shall it stop? A sociologist might also argue that his religious critics have more faith in him than in their own doctrine, the doctrine that man is infinitely tough and resourceful and is not easily cheated of his freedom to sin. What God has given no man can take away, certainly no sociologist. More seriously, he might argue that the social sciences are not in train to eliminate morality but to make greater demands of it. A sociology that shows us unsuspected or not hitherto understood ways in which men are bound up with one another invites more refined answers to the question: "Am I my brother's keeper?""

"The Black student movement ... raised the questions: Why should we study classical sociological theory and be taught nothing about the history of Black sociological thought, including the works of W. E. B. DuBois, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver C. Cox and others? Why should we be taught courses on deviance, social disorganization and social problems which take as given that Blacks should be defined as the perpetrators and creators of social pathology and not as its victims?"

"The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our lives how impossible that is. How, then, can there be a "social science"? The answer, surely, is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science although it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly. Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists."

"Myth does not set out to give lessons in natural science any more than in morals or sociology."

"Sociology is the science which has the most methods and the least results."

"Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant ra~onale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables."

"Anyone who has studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, or any of the other wacko-and-wog disciplines knows the three great rules of the social sciences: Folks do lots of things. We don't know why. Test on Friday."

"The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors— psychology, sociology, women's studies— to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view."

"I understand the task of sociology to be description and determination of the historical-psychological origin of those forms in which interactions take place between human beings. The totality of these interactions, springing from the most diverse impulses, directed toward the most diverse objects, and aiming at the most diverse ends, constitutes "society.""

"What is sociology? Even a cursory glance at an introductory textbook, or a quick perusal of an undergraduate curriculum, would reveal that sociology, as taught in the U.S.—and much of the world—is centrally concerned with the large-scale historical and institutional forces shaping contemporary societies, especially social class, gender, race, and citizenship. A more informed view would complicate this simple picture... But it would still be the case that the central goal of much sociology is to shine a spotlight on the institutionalized forces creating enduring forms of inequality and hierarchy. How could it be otherwise in a discipline in which the works of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim are fundamental (e.g. “classical”) points of orientation?"

"A fundamental problem in such studies stems from the long tradition that has regarded artistic productions as social facts. by regarding such productions as social facts the analyst is relieved of the burden of demonstrating what meanings these productions have for the artist and his audience. It is too frequently assumed that such meanings can be identified by a capable analyst, independent of the interpretations brought to such works by the artist or his audiences. In my judgement artist productions must be seen as interactional creations; the meanings of which arise out of the interactions directed to them by the artist and his audience."

"In constructionism, we observe [...] a strategy [...] that exalts the role of the professor in the construction of reality: its fundamental text is Foucault“s ”'The Order of Things, which states that man is constructed by the human sciences and could disappear with them. (pp. 43-44)"

"Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly "objective" historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biasses that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some "deconstructive" histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves."

"A further turn is to be found in some "unmasking" accounts of natural science, which aim to show that its pretensions to deliver the truth are unfounded, because of social forces that control its activities. Unlike the case of history, these do not use truths of the same kind; they do not apply science to the criticism of science. They apply the social sciences, and typically depend on the remarkable assumption that the sociology of knowledge is in a better position to deliver truth about science than science is to deliver truth about the world."

"Years ago recruitment for cultic groups was far more obvious than today because extreme religious groups were easy to identify. They lived isolated from the general population, and the public had become aware of their deceptive recruiting techniques. Today many are attracted to organizations that are less overtly cultic, not overtly religious, and are often linked with the human potential movement, while others operate as businesses, with their tactics focused around financial success."

"Another potent element of the new cult milieu was the therapy sect, which offered believers the chance to achieve their full human potential through personal growth and self-actualization by taking total responsibility for one's actions."

"Another term coined by Haack is Psychokulte (therapy cults), of which he distinguished two kinds: those with techniques which promise self-discovery or self-realization and establishments with therapies (Therapie-Institutionene)—Heelas's 'self-religions'. The followers of both types show the effects of Psychomutation, a distinct personality change (Haack, 1990a:191). Schneider (1995:189–190) lists organizations, such as Landmark Education, Verein zur Förderung der Psychologischen Menschenkenntnis (VPM), Scientology/Dianetics, Ontologische Einweihungsschule (Hannes Scholl), EAP and Die Bewegung (Silo) as examples of 'therapy cults'. These groups do not immediately suggest religion of Weltanschauung, but reveal ideological and religious elements on closer inspection. Their slogans are 'We have the saving principle' or 'We enable those who are able' and they offer Lebenshilfe (advice on how to live). Such advice is a commodity which is sold in very expensive seminars. The ideologies involved often lie in the grey areas between the humanities, psychotherapies, Lebenshilfe, 'mental hygiene' (Psychohygiene), and religion."

"There was nothing special about our time with Andrew. We've been members in just another cultish group that make its members feel special. Our experiences are fundamentally no different from countless others in spiritual and political groups. We see clearly that corruption is difficult to avoid when a charismatic individual is given absolute power over a group of followers. All authoritarian groups have more or less the same dynamic. The emphasis on surrender, the initial happiness of merging into something bigger, the dogmatism, the rules and regulations, the suppression of doubts, it's the same everywhere."

"Religion, cult, there's no real definition of which is which. It's more like, 'if the shoe fits'. I personally define a 'cult' as any religion with fewer followers than has on Twitter. Also, Mormonism is secretive, and that's another trait I associate with cults. Catholics own their crazy. It's right on the table. Mormons are more like Fight Club."

"If Jones' People's Temple wasn't a cult, then the term has no meaning."

"The difference between a cult and an established religion is sometimes about one generation."

"After a decade of activity, the anti-cult movement had one significant accomplishment to its credit. It had succeeded in creating a pervasive negative image of the new religions and spreading a popular public prejudice against several groups which had become well known as "cults." However, it proved incapable of implementing any of its major program goals, which sought to severely regulate, inhibit the growth of, and eventually eliminate the cults altogether."

"It is important to realize that cults are a dime a dozen and that a great many businesses are cults."

"Outsiders often criticize the extreme commitment of group members. But what is really happening is that leader and followers are conspiring to realize a vision that is falsified daily. For the cult is not paradise, and the leader is not God. Hence the follower is embattled; to squarely confront the many failings of the leader and the group is to call into question one's own great work. Only by daily recommitting himself can the follower continue to work toward his ultimate goal. Each follower works out a secret compromise, acknowledging some things while denying or distorting others. Clearly this is a high-risk strategy that may go awry."

"I do not want this material to be considered any sort of mumbo jumbo. It is not a cult in the terms people often consider material that seems to come from a source beyond the individual who gives it. The designations spirit, and medium, and so forth, are ridiculous to begin with. You are simply using your inner senses. These senses are not magical, they certainly are not religious in any sense of the word, and I am not some degenerated secondary personality of Ruburt's. Nor will I be compared with some long-bearded, beady-eyed spirit sitting on cloud nine."

"Whenever there is an absolute truth at stake, the manners become careless. This applies both to the owners as well as their opponents of that truth and to all people involved."

"Cult leaders succeed in dominating their followers because they have mastered the cruel art of exploiting universal human dependency and attachment needs in others."

"Some of these terms, including "cult" and "sect," have long traditions of use, stretching back to the centuries when Latin was the official language of scholars. But the meanings of words often change over time; and terms that once were neutral or simply descriptive sometimes take on harshly negative implications and potentially lose their original usefulness, including the two just mentioned. Other terms have been coined more recently to circumvent the stereotypes associated with older categories. Among this newer terminology are "outsider groups" and "New Religious Movements." Sometimes the newer nomenclature is useful despite certain limitations. "Marginal religious communities," for example, is a positional designation — not a qualitative judgment — implying a location on the margin or edge of mainstream religious groups. When using these terms, it is important to recognize that they are often loaded with powerful assumptions and implications."

"We are told, that in Turkey, when any Man is the Author of Notorious Falsehoods, it is usual to blacken the whole Front of his House. Nay we have sometimes heard, that an Embassador, whose Business it is (if I may quote his Character in Sir Henry Wotton's Words) to lie for the Good of his Country, has sometimes had this Mark set upon his House; when he been detected in any Piece of feign'd Intelligence, that has prejudiced the Government, and misled the Minds of the People. One could almost wish that the Habitations of such of our own Countrymen as deal in Forgeries detrimental to the Public, were distinguished in the same Manner; that their Fellow-Subjects might be cautioned not to be too easy in giving Credit to them. Were such a Method put in Practice, this Metropolis would be strangely checquered; some entire Parishes would be in Mourning, and several Streets darkened from one End to the other."

"Sir Humphrey: Plays criticising the government make the second most boring evenings ever invented."

"Jim Hacker: What are the most boring?"

"Sir Humphrey: Plays praising the government."

"Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended."

"Propaganda is a monologue that is not looking for an answer, but an echo."

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits."

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

"Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government."

"The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest."

"Goebbels ... was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me."

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

"The success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century."

"One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system--and they believe what the system expects them to believe. By and large, they're part of the privileged elite, and share the interests and perceptions of those in power."

"For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the propaganda system to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments."

"[In] democratic societies … the state can't control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it's much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think. … One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate."

"State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day."

"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."

"But perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps our memory deceives us. Dr. Goebbels and his Propaganda Machine have their own version of what happened twenty-five years ago. To hear them talk, you would suppose that it was Belgium that invaded Germany! There they were, these peaceful Prussians, gathering in their harvests, when this wicked, Belgium – set on by England and the Jews – fell upon them; and would no doubt have taken Berlin, if Corporal Adolf Hitler had not come to the rescue and turned the tables. Indeed, the tale goes further. After four years of war by land and sea, when Germany was about to win an overwhelming victory, the Jews got at them again, this time from the rear. Armed with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points they stabbed, we are told, the German armies in the back, and induced them to ask for an armistice, and even persuaded them, in an unguarded moment, to sign a paper saying that it was they and not the Belgians who had been the ones to begin the War. Such is history as it is taught in topsy-turvydom. And now it is holiday again, and where are we now? Or, as you sometimes ask in the United States – where do we go from here?"

"The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized."

"Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude."

"Modern propaganda is based on scientific analyses of psychology and sociology. Step by step, the propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning — and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology. He shapes his procedures on the basis of our knowledge of groups and their laws of formation and dissolution, of mass influences, and of environmental limitations. Without the scientific research of modern psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda, or rather we still would be in the primitive stages of propaganda that existed in the time of Pericles or Augustus."

"The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective."

"Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve."

"Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality."

"We can now advance a definition of propaganda — not an exhaustive definition, unique and exclusive of all others, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization."

"There remains the problem of Goebbels' reputation. He wore the title of Big Liar (bestowed by Anglo-Saxon propaganda) and yet he never stopped battling for propaganda to be as accurate as possible. He preferred being cynical and brutal to being caught in a lie. He used to say: "Everybody must know what the situation is." He was always the first to announce disastrous events or difficult situations, without hiding anything. The result was a general belief between 1939 and 1942 that German communiqués not only were more concise, clearer and less cluttered, but were more truthful than Allied communiqués (American and neutral opinion) — and, furthermore, that the Germans published all the news two or three days before the Allies. All this is so true that pinning the title of Big Liar on Goebbels must be considered quite a propaganda success."

"Both Superpowers used propaganda to penetrate their enemy’s territory. From the Kremlin came torrents of upbeat economic reports and antifascist diatribes as well as attacks on Western racism, capitalism, warmongering, and imperialism, which were echoed by Communist Party leaders and adherents in the West. The other side sent radio broadcasts in the national languages of Eastern Europe from the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the BBC with news from the outside world, encouraging the “captive populations” to seek freedom from Moscow’s domination."

"We use the term “junk news” to include various forms of propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political news and information. Much of this content is deliberately produced false reporting. It seeks to persuade readers about the moral virtues or failings of organizations, causes or people and presents commentary as a news product...[using] ad hominem attacks, emotionally charged words and pictures, unsafe generalizations and other logical fallacies."

"Scientifically regarded, propaganda is merely a form of mental suggestion."

"All effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands."

"Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

"Pope Gregory XV made a new start by setting up in 1622 the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith... The new Congregation was supposed to supervise the missions and coordinate their activities. In due course, it came to be known as Propaganda from its Latin name — Propaganda di Fide. An otherwise innocent word was to acquire a bad odour in succeeding centuries because of its association with Popery. Though this department is still an integral part of the Pope's establishment at Rome, it has been renamed the Sacred Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples. The shame which this set-up has brought upon the Pope by its close cooperation with Western imperialism for four-and-a-half centuries, is being sought to be hidden by a bit of linguistic surgery."

"Propaganda must be limited to a few simple themes and these must be represented again and again. Here, as in innumerable other cases, perseverance is the first and most important condition of success."

"In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

"We tend today to exaggerate the effectiveness of persuasion as a means of inculcating opinion and shaping behavior. ...Actually the fabulous effects ascribed to propaganda have no greater foundation in fact than the fall of the walls of Jericho ascribed to the blast of Joshua's trumpets."

"Russians might not believe official media, but might also choose — perhaps subconsciously — not to acknowledge the extent to which they allow themselves to be deceived. (It bears mentioning that social media analysts of the 2016 US presidential election noted a similar phenomenon: Citizens can, and often do, choose to believe comfortable falsehoods, instead of admitting to truths that disrupt their desired way of seeing the world.) Looking at Russian television news after the takeover of Crimea in 2014, journalist Maria Lipman concluded that the more extreme and far-fetched the claims of various programs became, the more their audiences grew. “Russian viewers tuned into shows,” she and two colleagues argued in a 2018 essay, “in search of not truth, but emotional gratification.” Viewers wanted to believe wildly distorted media stories that affirmed “national pride and a sense of vindication.”"

"All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder."

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."

"Highly intelligent people hate to admit they have fallen for such propaganda, and often get angry when it is suggested to them that they have."

"His (Hitler's) primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

"What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...The very men who most loudly proclaim their “materialism” and their contempt for “ideologues,” the Marxian communists, place their entire hope on what? On the formation by propaganda of a class-conscious group. But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?"

"Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. ...It is often very illuminating, therefore, to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see?"

"Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable."

"Propaganda is defined as the manipulation of the public to the end of securing some specific action."

"Its aim is to “put something over” on people, with or without their knowledge or consent… neither truth nor the basic values of civilization get a fair hearing."

"Prejudice and the well-known weaknesses of human nature are to be exploited and thus encouraged."

"So long as the public may be manipulated by misrepresentation and by appeal to ignorance and prejudice, it is the public’s own fault if the “knowing ones” make use of questionable methods."

"The evil effect of these attempts to manipulate the multitude by pampering its weaknesses — in return for material and other advantages to persons and for ends not disclosed — is clearly seen in various aspects of our common life. In politics such effect have long been deplorable."

"It is the trivial, the irrelevant, the sensational, the appeal to obsolete bigotry which naturally give it greatest publicity. In such publicity it becomes a mere vulgar caricature of itself."

"One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd."

"The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind."

"The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production."

"Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible..."

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth."

"Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'..."

"In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media. The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions. Don't you know that? So it is possible to get involved in this work, but it is cost prohibitive, so to speak. We can simply shine the spotlight on our sources of information, and we will not achieve results. It is clear to the whole world what happened, and even American analysts talk about it directly. It's true."

"Propaganda is a bitter medicine. You receive the cure for your illnesses from the doctor that inoculates it under your skin, and from a needle that carefully touches important nerves of the human mind and spirit."

"Never has the media been so influential in determining the course of war as during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which, as far as the Western media are concerned, has essentially become a battle over images and ideas. Israel has already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or information for the outside world (hence, propaganda). This has included an entire range of efforts: lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students who, over a week in a secluded country estate, can be primed to “defend” Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen and women with invitations and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election campaigns; directing (or, as the case requires, harassing) photographers and writers of the current intifada into producing certain images and not others; lecture and concert tours by prominent Israelis; training commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel’s predicament today; many advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel; and on and on. Because so many powerful people in the media and publishing business are strong supporters of Israel, the task is made vastly easier."

"Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business."

"While few in Britain or Germany wanted a war, it is a historical fact that the mass of the people in both countries eventually tolerated one, and participated, if not with enthusiasm, then with a grim determination. This is especially true of the journey undertaken by the mass of the public in Germany, which had been deeply reluctant go to war in September 1938 over the Sudetenland, but a little less than a year later allowed itself to be persuaded that conflict with Poland was legitimate and necessary. The propaganda campaign undertaken by the Nazi regime to this end provides a near-perfect example of how, when a government exercises total control of information, an entire nation can be bent to its will."

"The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he's a the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. If you aren't careful, because I've seen some of you caught in that bag, you run away hating yourself and loving the man — while you're catching hell from the man. You let the man maneuver you into thinking that it's wrong to fight him when he's fighting you. He's fighting you in the morning, fighting you in the noon, fighting you at night and fighting you all in between, and you still think it's wrong to fight him back. Why? The press. The newspapers make you look wrong."

"We’ve just welcomed the 8 billionth member of the human race on this planet. That’s a wonderful birth of a baby, of course. But we need to understand that the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure. As far as biodiversity is concerned, we are at war with nature. We need to make peace with nature. Because nature is what sustains everything on Earth … the science is unequivocal."

"Babies are the enemies of the human race... Let's consider it this way: by the time the world doubles its population, the amount of energy we will be using will be increased sevenfold which means probably the amount of pollution that we are producing will also be increased sevenfold. If we are now threatened by pollution at the present rate, how will we be threatened with sevenfold pollution… distributed among twice the population? We'll be having to grow twice the food out of soil that is being poisoned at seven times the rate."

"It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies."

"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth, or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now."

"The success of modern medicine is today so great, that millions of people are kept alive - if not cured - who in earlier days, and with less scientific aptitude, would normally have died. In this developed skill and knowledge, and in this aptitude in the care of the physical mechanism, is today to be found a major world problem - the problem of overpopulation of the planet, leading to the herd life of humanity and the consequent economic problem - to mention only one of the incidental difficulties of this success. This "unnatural" preservation of life is the cause of much suffering, and is a fruitful source of war, being contrary to the karmic intent of the planetary Logos. With this vast problem, I cannot here deal. I can only indicate it. It will be solved when the fear of death disappears, and when humanity learns the significance of time and the meaning of the cycles."

"As we slide seamlessly from 7 billion to 8 billion humans, each generation more powerful, polluting, and destructive than the previous, I have to wonder whether one century is too much time to allow a “natural” progression into negative population growth, or whether the biodiversity damage a century like this one will inflict could be incalculable and irreversible, if not terminal for us. Think about the honey bees and hummingbirds. Think about the sudden absence of insects we are seeing all over the world, and how that soon may affect populations farther up or down the food chain. Now, Mr. Biotech Billionaire, are you serious about populating the world with thousands or millions of bicentiniarians [sic] and tricentinarians [sic]?"

"Whereas the unconscious operations and blind forces of the planet have provoked turbulent changes over the last 4.5 billion years of earth’s evolutionary history, now change is being directed by a conscious and volitional agent – "humanity." We cannot speak of humanity equally, to be sure, as the problem was caused by the industrialized capitalist West and the poorer nations who contributed least to climate crisis will be hit the hardest. But nations such as China, India, and Brazil are major contributors, and the cumulative impact of 7.5 billion people on the planet is causing extinction and collapse everywhere. The stability of the Holocene is now gone, changes are accelerating beyond our understanding and control, and chaos waits at our door."

"The geometric growth rate of humans is unprecedented and never in the history of the earth has a single species grown to such bloated proportions, completely out of balance with living systems. The problem is only worsening. On conservative estimates, the human population is expected to swell upwards to 8–10 billion by 2050, and perhaps expand significantly by 2100. Human population growth represents a crisis of the highest order, but of course, it is only one aspect of multiple crises -- including species extinction and climate change -- merging together in a perfect storm of catastrophe that forms the daunting challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene."

"Currently, the operation of our present industrial civilization is almost wholly dependent on access to huge amounts of fossil fuels. It is important to understand that fossil fuels, especially oil, are not simply used to manufacture and propel passenger automobiles or trucks. They also facilitate the mass assembly of tractors, plows, irrigation pipes, and pumps and then turn around and power them also. They constitute the chemical base of many crucial fertilizers and pesticides. They are also the building blocks of agricultural plastics. They refrigerate perishables. In short, the modern industrial agriculture system could not function without copious amounts of fossil fuel. In the absence of fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture, world food production would plummet to a scale completely inadequate to sustain our current population size, let alone the net addition of over 80 million more people each year. The other side of the coin is that when humans co-opt the extraordinary power found in fossil fuels, we become “overpowered” – and that is how we are over-powering the Earth’s biosphere. We cannot destroy rainforests at the rate of several football fields per minute, trawl the deep oceans, attempt mass-scale aqua-culture, fragment habitat with asphalt roads, or construct miles and miles of urban sprawl without the power of fossil fuels. In summary, fossil fuels underwritten both our population size and growth and our discretionary (over)consumption."

"In my opinion, you have out-of-control population growth, and you have fewer and fewer [resources]—we are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. Ever. And I think that within 40 or 50 years, we’ll be there. If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential decline, what happens first is you get increases in wealth discrepancy, which means that you get rich pockets of gated communities with security guards outside them, and you get more and more poverty outside that area. And the resources go down, and people start having resource wars over water and food and agriculture and arable land, and then you have Joburg in 2050. And you can see signs of it everywhere. It’s just overpopulation and lack of resources. We just aren’t in control of our destiny."

"... Reverend THOMAS MALTHUS' prediction made in 1798—that man would reproduce himself into a condition of "misery and vice" because of the growing imbalance caused by the multiplication of his own numbers by geometric progression, while his food supply was increasing arithmetically—is as valid today as when it was made. He was a visionary and saw clearly the monster of overpopulation. The only error in his prediction was one of a "few seconds on the clock of human occupancy of the earth". We, agriculturists, can buy at most a few decades of time in which to bring population growth into successful balance with food production."

"It seems self-evident that our fundamental predicament of ecological overshoot is a direct result of humanity’s growth with too many people consuming too many resources and producing too many waste products for a finite planet dependent upon healthy ecological systems. And while this doesn’t require much explanation for those who acknowledge that we live upon a world with finite resources and limited capacity to compensate for our waste production, there are still many who believe that Homo sapiens’ rather unique cognitive abilities and technological prowess can and will ‘solve’ the many challenges we appear to be encountering as we reach and surpass the planetary limits of our relatively recent explosive growth, global expansion, and industrialisation."

"All living species must take from nature to survive, and we are no different. But unlike other species, there seems to be no end to our quest for food, comfort, shelter, sex — the fundamental necessities of survival that are now pursued in overdrive, far beyond our existential needs. We are compelled to progress, and have extracted resources from the land since we first stood on two feet. The entire twentieth century has been a revving up of this large consumptive engine, and this insatiable human striving has assaulted the very planet that sustains us. In a very short period of time, humankind, with its population explosion, industry and technology, has become an agent of immense global change. What this civilization leaves in the wake of its progress may be an opened and emptied Earth. But in performing these incursions, we also participate in the unwitting creation of gigantic monuments to our way of life."

"Global biodiversity decline is best understood as too many people consuming and producing too much and displacing other species. Wild landscapes and seascapes are replaced with people, our domestics and commensals, our economic support systems, and our trash."

"During the past hundred years, Homo sapiens population increased from 2 billion to nearly 8 billion and the United Nations (2019) projects an increase of 3 billion more by 2100, unless steps are taken to reduce this population growth. Ignoring this projected increase means ignoring a major driver of the unfolding biodiversity crisis; accepting current bloated human numbers as an appropriate status quo means accepting a biologically impoverished planet."

"Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century economist, once predicted that because our population size increases exponentially while our food supply increases arithmetically, our population will one day exceed our ability to sustain it. While this has now been disproven with the creation of processed foods and genetically modified organisms, [Peter] Farb’s paradox may hold true. Because Earth’s population is growing, we increase our food production. Then, because we have a surplus of food, people are more well-nourished, leading to higher life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates, and people are able to have more children. This cyclical paradox is not healthy for our planet because while we may be able to sustain our growing population’s appetites, our other important resources, such as water and oil, are dwindling. To have a sustainable population size, we should be reproducing at a replacement rate, much like Denmark and Japan are."

"Today [hu]mankind is locked into stealing ravenously from the future. Famine in the modern world must be… one of several symptoms reflecting a deeper malady of in the human condition—namely, diachronic competition, a relationship whereby contemporary well-being is achieved at the expense of our descendants. By our sheer numbers, by the state of our technological development, and by being oblivious to differences between a method that achieved lasting increments of human carrying capacity [agriculture] and one that achieves only temporary supplements [reliance on fossil fuels and other mined substances], we have made satisfaction of today's human aspirations dependent upon massive deprivation for posterity."

"We are already living on an overloaded world. Our future will be a product of that fact; that fact is a product of our past. Our first order of business, then, is to make clear to ourselves how we got where we are and why our present situation entails a certain kind of future. […] It is the story of a world that has again and again approached the condition of being saturated with human inhabitants, only to have the limit raised by human ingenuity. The first several rounds of limit-raising were accomplished by a series of technological breakthroughs that took almost two million years. These breakthroughs enabled human populations repeatedly to take over for human use portions of the earth’s total life-supporting capacity that had previously supported other species. The most recent episode of limit-raising has had much more spectacular results, although it enlarged human carrying capacity by a fundamentally different method: the drawing down of finite reservoirs of materials that do not replace themselves within any human time frame. Thus its results cannot be permanent. This fact puts mankind out on a limb which the activities of modern life are busily sawing off."

"Scarcely more than two generations had tasted the fruits of industrialization when the growth of population was still further accelerated by truly effective death control. The role of microorganisms in producing diseases was discovered. In 1865 the practice of antiseptic surgery began. It serves... as a reasonable demarcation of the beginning of an era filled with related breakthroughs in medical technology: hygienic practices, vaccination, antibiotics, etc. The total effect of this recent series of achievements has been to emancipate mankind more... from the life-curtailing effects of the invisible creatures for which human tissues used to serve as sustenance. Like other prey species newly protected from their predators, we have been fruitful and have so multiplied that we have much more than "replenished" the earth with our kind."

"People displayed either persistent ignorance of the carrying capacity concept or naive faith that carrying capacity could always be expanded, [and] that limits could always be transcended. Such an assump­tion seemed to underlie the stubborn refusal of capitalists and Marx­ists alike to acknowledge that the myth of limitlessness had, at last, become obsolete. There was also the assumption that further ad­vances in technology would necessarily enlarge carrying capacity, not reduce it. Enlargement of carrying capacity had been the role of tech­nology in the past; however… there has been a reversal of this role in the industrial era. Technology has en­larged human appetites for natural resources, thus diminishing the number of us that a given environment can support."

"[Hu]man[s]... have imagined... [themselves] to be more unlike other mammals than [t]he[y] really... [are], so when human behavior has shown these same characteristics, various other explanations have been put forth which have obscured the significance of population pressure itself. In the twentieth century, with human numbers enlarged and resource draw­down becoming significant, [hu]man[kind] went to war. [T]he[y] rioted in the streets. [T]he[y] committed more... crimes of violence. [...] [Their] political atti­tudes polarized and [t]he[y] created totalitarian governments, some of which gave license to sadistic tendencies. A generation gap widened and deepened. In spite of earnest efforts by humane activists to inhibit racism and to rectify economic inequality, disparities between people remained and animosities became more virulent. Standards of de­cency in behavior toward others and expectations of considerate self-­restraint were eroded and degraded in many places."

"We need to realize the "load" with which we humans burden the planet's ecosystems consists of more than just a population number. People living by different cultures not only reproduce at different rates; they impose very different per capita ecological impacts. Culture includes a population's technology and people's ways of organizing themselves. Each of us living in a "developed" country (i.e., industrialized far beyond anything conceivable to Malthus) has an enormously greater resource appetite and environmental impact than does each resident of a so-called "developing" country. For our grossly unsustainable manner of living, 6 billion is far too many."

"Life has now entered a . This is probably the most serious environmental problem, because the loss of a species is permanent, each of them playing a greater or lesser role in the living systems on which we all depend. The species extinctions that define the current crisis are, in turn, based on the massive disappearance of their component populations, mostly since the 1800s. The massive losses that we are experiencing are being caused, directly or indirectly, by the activities of Homo sapiens. They have almost all occurred since our ancestors developed agriculture, some 11,000 y ago. At that time, we numbered about 1 million people worldwide; now there are 7.7 billion of us, and our numbers are still rapidly growing. As our numbers have grown, humanity has come to pose an unprecedented threat to the vast majority of its living companions."

"We are in the sixth mass extinction event. Unlike the previous five, this one is caused by the overgrowth of a single species, Homo sapiens."

"Over the last century the pace of many human activities has so accelerated, and human overpopulation grown so severe, to have created a dramatic global environmental transformation. Most natural ecosystem have been highly modified or have disappeared altogether, and the abundance of wildlife has been greatly reduced."

"Our use of energy has been increasing ever since we discovered and mastered fire and developed agriculture, but mostly since we gained access to a vastly increased energy supply by extracting millions of years of stored and concentrated solar energy from the Earth’s crust in the form of fossil fuels. Combined with the development of new energy conversion techniques, this energy bonanza made it possible to lift the secular barriers to human population and output growth. The new energy sources, forms and uses that came online since the turn of the 19th century gave us access to more materials and enabled the invention of new and increasingly sophisticated exosomatic instruments (i.e. machines), which in turn made it possible to access ever more energy and matter and to transform them ever more effectively and efficiently. This resulted in a rapid rise in our total energy and material “throughput” (i.e. the flow of raw materials and energy from the biosphere’s sources, through the human ecosystem, and back to the biosphere’s sinks), which is what we commonly measure through the proxy concept of “economic growth”. This rise never stopped since then, even if the global distribution of the flows of energy and material inputs, outputs and wastes evolved over time. Our efforts to increase the “energy efficiency” of our machines and processes (i.e. reducing the amount of energy needed to perform certain tasks) never resulted in a reduction of the total energy we used, but on the contrary only contributed to create more room for increasing the rate of our consumption."

"Environmental analysts regard a sustainable human population as one enjoying a modest, equitable middle-class standard of living on a planet retaining its biodiversity and with climate-related adversities minimized. Analysts' estimate[s] of that population size vary between 2 and 4 billion people, a figure obviously well below the present 7.9."

"The situation in which we find ourselves today is unique as regards the magnitude and rate of growth of the human enterprise. The turn now being taken by the vicious circle is tremendous. […] The mastery of fire, one of humans' first instances of technological development, continues to be of paramount importance today with the burning of fossil fuels. And so the vicious circle of the development of humankind churns on, and does so with ever greater momentum due to the constantly increasing consumption of fossil fuels and metals, with only the tiniest sign of resistance in the form of the efforts of environmental organisations and green political parties."

"The population boom of the last few centuries […] was made possible by massive advances in living standards, economic growth, surpluses of food, and vastly improved public health. All of this, however, was sustained by fossil fuels. Once fossil fuel reserves peak […] production, growth, and the amenities of modern life will gradually halt. Contemporary industrial society will downgrade into a “scarcity society” that manages on minimal energy, after which it will become a “salvage society” that scrapes survival from the refuse of the defunct urban buildings, information networks, and industrial centers."

"Part of human impact on the earth relates to our swiftly growing numbers. If we do not take deliberate, conscious action to maintain a reasonable balance between the numbers of people and the environmental wealth required to sustain us, nature will make appropriate adjustments, and famine, disease, and wars-the predictable outcomes of living beyond one's environmental means, of overspending environmental capital-will ultimately force a cruel discipline."

"The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated."

"The debate regarding which individual factor, among the three key factors producing the environmental crisis, causes more damage - the size of the human population on the planet, excessive consumption of resources, or unequal/ unjust distribution of resources among countries [the wealthier countries consume much more resources, per person on average than poorer countries] - is like a debate about which contributes more to a triangle, the base or the ribs of the triangle. You can not separate the three factors. If we analyze the numbers over a relatively longer time interval, we will conclude that the size of the population has a bigger impact than consumption. On the other hand, consumption and unequal distribution are also important aspects. If we do not change these three factors all at the same time, the quality of our life will change dramatically. Today humanity is delivering a serious blow to [the rest of] nature, but it is clear that nature will deliver the final blow."

"Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of ten billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency – an unprecedented planetary emergency."

"We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us. There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more. We got to where we are now through a number of civilization-and society-shaping “events”; most notably, the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution, and—in the West—the public-health revolution. These events have fundamentally shaped how we live, and have fundamentally shaped our planet. Their legacy will continue to shape our future. So we need to look at our growth and activities through the lens of these developments. One of the principal reasons for this growth was the invention of agriculture. The “agricultural revolution” enabled us to go from being hunter-gatherers to highly organized producers of food, and allowed our population to grow. A useful way to think of the development and importance of agriculture is in terms of at least three agricultural “revolutions.” The first took place over 10,000 years ago. This was the domestication of animals and the cultivation of plant types. The second agricultural revolution was between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a revolution in agricultural productivity and the mechanization of food production. The third happened between the 1950s and 2000s; the so-called “green revolution.” But there’s another story here: the start of a fundamental transformation—of land use—by humans."

"As our numbers continue to grow, we continue to increase our need for far more water, far more food, far more land, far more transportation, and far more energy. As a result, we are now accelerating the rate at which we’re changing our climate. In fact, our activities are not only completely interconnected with, but are now also interacting with, the complex system we live on: Earth. It is important to understand how all this is connected. An increasing population accelerates the demand for more water and more food. Demand for more food increases the need for more land, which accelerates deforestation. Increasing demand for food also increases food processing and transportation. All of these accelerate the demand for more energy. This then accelerates greenhouse gas emissions, principally CO2 and methane, which further accelerate climate change. As climate change accelerates, it increases stress on water, food, and land. And at the same time, an increasing population also accelerates stress on water, food, and land. In short, as population increases, and as economies grow, stress on the entire system accelerates sharply."

"Saying “Don’t have children” is utterly ridiculous. It contradicts every genetically coded piece of information we contain, and (at least in their conception) one of the most important (and fun) impulses we have. That said, the worst thing we can continue to do—globally—is have children at the current rate. Even if a global nuclear power program were set up, even if geoengineering somehow took care of the climate-change problem, and even if we consumed less, we’d still at some point hit a brick wall if the human population continues to grow at anything like its current rate. We all know there’s a link between educating women in the developing world and reducing the birth rate. But despite this, and despite contraception being free in a number of countries where population is increasing, average birth rates are still three, five, or even seven children per woman. According to the United Nations, Zambia’s population is projected to increase by 941 percent by the end of the century. The population of Nigeria is projected to grow by 349 percent—to 730 million people. Afghanistan by 242 percent, The Democratic Republic of Congo by 213 percent, Gambia by 242 percent, Guatemala by 369 percent, Iraq by 344 percent, Kenya by 284 percent, Liberia by 300 percent, Malawi by 741 percent, Mali by 408 percent, Niger by 766 percent, Somalia by 663 percent, Uganda by 396 percent, Yemen by 299 percent. Even the United States is projected to grow by 53 percent by 2100, from 315 million in 2012 to 478 million. I do just want to point out that if the current global rate of reproduction continues, by the end of this century there will not be ten billion of us. There will be twenty-eight billion of us."

"If we discovered tomorrow that there was an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and—because physics is a fairly simple science—we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth on June 3, 2072, and we knew that its impact was going to wipe out 70 percent of all life on Earth, governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet into unprecedented action. Every scientist, engineer, university, and business would be enlisted: half to find a way of stopping it, the other half to find a way for our species to survive and rebuild if the first option were unsuccessful. We are in almost precisely that situation now, except that there isn’t a specific date and there isn’t an asteroid. The problem is us. Why we are not doing more about the situation we’re in—given the scale of the problem and the urgency—I simply cannot understand. We’re spending 8 billion euros (about 11 billion dollars [at the writing's current exchange]) at to discover evidence of a particle called the Higgs-Boson, which may or may not eventually explain the concept of mass and provide a partial thumbs-up for the “standard model” of particle physics. And CERN’s physicists are keen to tell us it is the biggest, most important experiment on Earth. It isn’t. The biggest and most important experiment on Earth is the one we're all conducting, right now, on Earth itself. Only an idiot would deny that there is a limit to how many people our Earth can support. The question is, is it seven billion (our current population), 10 billion or 28 billion? I think we've already gone past it. Well past it. We could change the situation we are now in. Probably not by technologizing our way out of it, but by radically changing our behavior. But there is no sign that this is happening, or about to happen. I think it’s going to be business as usual for us."

"Whether or not such a hypothesis fully accounts for the population increase that accompanies a sedentary life, there can be no doubt that human numbers soared. In the interval from 10,000 to 6000 years ago—a mere 160 human generations—the population of the Near East is estimated to have increased from less than 100,000 people to more than three million. With each increase, additional pressure was placed upon the food producers to domesticate new species and to invent new technologies, such as those based on the plow and on irrigation. Human beings now found themselves on a treadmill from which to this day they have not been able to get off. They are still plagued by the basic paradox of food production: Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population."

"During the brief time since James Watt's commercial production of the improved Newcomen steam engine in 1775, a revolution unparalleled in human history has occurred at all levels of society and has penetrated all aspects of culture. The technological innovations are, of course, dramatic, but equally important are the biological, political, social, and economic consequences of modernization. From a biological perspective, the most important consequence is the extension of the human life span and the growth in human numbers. In the past two centuries, life expectancy has nearly tripled and the population of our species has multiplied five times over."

"If left unchecked, populations (of any organism) tend to grow exponentially. But they never grow forever. Eventually resources are depleted and the population declines. When the population is again small enough that resources are plentiful, exponential growth resumes. The result is a boom-bust cycle — stability through fluctuation. Of course, if the fluctuations are huge, we can hardly call this ‘stability’. But in most healthy ecosystems, population fluctuations are small. The key to dampening boom-bust cycles appears to be diversity. When there are many species in an ecosystem, each keeps the population of others in check. Prolonged exponential growth never gets a foothold."

"Overpopulation is described as a societal problem, with the individual and collective behavior of people as a causal agent."

"What are [we] made of, fairy dust and happy thoughts? No, [we] are made of proteins — of food! Without a sufficient food supply, such a population cannot be achieved. We understand this as a basic biological fact for every other species on this planet, that population is a function of food supply. Yet we continue to believe that the magic of free will exempts us from such basic biological laws."

"When the First World rushes in with foreign aid, food, and humanitarian aid to a desert area in the midst of a famine, we serve to prop up an unsustainable population. That drives a population boom in an area that already cannot support its existing population. The result is a huge population dependent on outside intervention that itself cannot be indefinitely sustained. Eventually, that population will crash once outside help is no longer possible — and the years of aid will only make that crash even more severe. In the same way that the United States’ policy of putting out all forest fires in the 1980s led to an even worse situation in its forests, our benevolence and good intentions have paved the way to a Malthusian hell."

"The human race currently consumes some 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. This monopoly on the earth’s resources is having a devastating effect. We are seeing the extinction of some 140 species every day, some thousands of times higher than the normal background rate. Today, right now, we are seeing extinction rates unparalleled in the history of the earth. We are undeniably in the midst of the seventh mass extinction event in the history of the earth — the Holocene Extinction. Unlikely previous extinction events, however, this one is driven by a single species. This is the true danger of overpopulation, not our inability to feed a growing population. As much as we would deny it, we depend on the earth to live. Dwindling biodiversity threatens the very survival of our species. We are literally cutting the ground out from under our feet. Increasing food production only increases the population; our current attitudes about food security has locked us into what Daniel Quinn called a “Food Race,” by comparison to the Arms Race of the Cold War."

"Overpopulation is the root cause of all other environmental problems … [and] is the natural consequence of the Food Race — driven by the constant need to expand. That need is a systemic consequence of complex society. The alternative to overpopulation, then, is to reverse the trend of intensifying complexity and accept greater simplicity: in a word, collapse."

"The main driving force behind the Holocene Extinction is the twin forces of overpopulation and intensified agricultural production. As more land is converted into cultivated fields, we approach important tipping points in how much of the world’s photosynthetic capacity is tied up in a single species. Deforestation is driven primarily by the need to feed an ever-growing populaton, but also for that population’s other resource needs, such as lumbering and mining. That deforestation has been responsible for anthropogenic atmospheric change for thousands of years, but as the positive feedback loop of the Food Race reached new levels, we were forced to either adopt fossil fuels, or collapse. Those fuels have intensified our atmospheric impact to obscene levels, yielding a new crisis in global warming. We do not face a long laundry list of environmental problems: we face a single, multi-faceted crisis. That crisis is complex society itself. The problems we face are the direct consequence of the positive feedback loop of complex society, and the Food Race in particular."

"If nobody died the planet would soon run out of room for more people. How would this world be run (our political systems are far from perfect now); who would decide what type of house one lived in, what type of food one ate? What would we do for a living?"

"The study of population is not a very exact science. No one forecast the population collapse that is occurring in post-communist European Russia, or the scale of the fall in fertility that is under way [sic] in much of the world. The margin of error in calculations of fertility and life expectancy is large. Even so, a further large increase is inevitable. […] A human population of approaching 8 billion [sic] can be maintained only by desolating the Earth. If wild habitat is given over to human cultivation and habitation, if rainforests can be turned into green deserts, if genetic engineering enables ever-higher yields to be extorted from the thinning soils – then humans will have created for themselves a new geological era, the Eremozoic, the Era of Solitude, in which little remains on the Earth but themselves and the prosthetic environment that keeps them alive."

"The future is brutally simple to anticipate; all overshot species collapse, and we have – by [apparently] transcending time via the levering of fossil energy – levered our species’ overshoot more than any ever has (or, almost certainly, ever could)."

"Over the last century, billions have enjoyed better, fuller and more enriched lives than their ancestors could dream of—but when all the bills for that are paid who knows how the ledgers of the two enterprises will stand?"

"My growing environmental awareness only adds more fuel to the argument for having no children. And the logic of never-ending consumption does not just harm the environment, it kills people too."

"The skeleton of our primate ancestors developed for millions of years to support a creature that walked on all fours and had a relatively small head. Adjusting to an upright position was quite a challenge, especially when the scaffolding had to support an extra-large cranium. Humankind paid for its lofty vision and industrious hands with backaches and stiff necks. Women paid extra. An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal - and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infants brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A colt can trot shortly after birth; a kitten leaves its mother to forage on its own when it is just a few weeks old. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education. This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind’s extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems. Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow. Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbours. It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal. Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln - any attempt at remoulding will scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving."

"Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud."

"The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day. (Take a second look at those figures — human population has increased fourteenfold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)"

"Since the Industrial Revolution, the world's human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900, we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000, that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today [as of this writing] there are just shy of 7 billion Homo Sapiens."

"Today [as of this writing], the earth's continents are home to almost 7 billion Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals—cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens—and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals—from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales—is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography, and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves, and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees—in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world."

"Around 1990, we became the most numerous mammalian species on the planet, outnumbering even rats."

"All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current [but declining] rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared."

"We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life forms — an estimated 8,760 species die off per year — because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food, and other resources. The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike, dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E. O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels, and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic — the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland."

"A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort."

"Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail."

"During the last 200 years, per capita energy usage grew eight-fold, while human population expanded at about the same rate. As a result of energy growth, all the things we do with energy became more doable. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mining exploded in scale. Energy became so abundant that it seemed we could solve any human problem, now or in the future, just by throwing more energy at it. We even reconfigured our economic system so that it assumes and requires perpetual growth. But growth in fossil-fuel energy can’t continue much longer: depletion and climate change will see to that. And even if we make a wholehearted effort to switch to low-carbon energy sources, we face limits to nature’s supplies of materials with which to make solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, and batteries. The ways we’re currently trying to share and manage power are insufficient also because we have failed to understand power itself. Rather than accepting that power limits exist, then surveying them and adapting ourselves to them, we try to finesse or deny them. We respond to climate change by hoping for a renewable energy transition—without questioning the amounts of energy we use or what we do with it. We deal with economic inequality by establishing minimal safeguards for the poor—without examining the structural means by which some people enrich themselves to absurd degrees."

"Prior to the widespread use of coal, oil, and natural gas, agrarian societies saw cyclical periods of rise and fall. But the scale of expansion since the dawn of the fossil-fueled industrial revolution, beginning roughly at the start of the 19th century, has been unprecedented. Energy usage per capita has grown 800 percent, as has population. Meanwhile, the contours of society have been transformed: for the first time in human history, most people now live in cities."

"Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption."

"Global human population has doubled three times in the past 200 years, surging from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1927, to 4 billion in 1974, to 8 billion today. Its highest rate of growth was in the 1960s, at over 2 percent per year; that rate is now down to 1.1 percent. If growth continues at the current rate, we’ll have about 18 billion people on Earth by the end of this century. All of this would be fine if we lived on a planet that was itself expanding, doubling its available quantities of minerals, forests, fisheries, and soil every quarter-century, and doubling its ability to absorb industrial wastes. But we don’t. It is essentially the same beautiful but finite planet that was spinning through space long before the origin of humans."

"Agriculture enabled population growth and social complexity, but it gradually robbed soils of nutrients. Sailing ships guided with clocks and navigational charts could increase the scope of trade, but building wooden ships (and making charcoal for forging steel) was leading to the deforestation of whole continents. A reckoning with limits seemed to be in store. Then a miracle happened. People who lived in some key centers of global trade started using fossil fuels—energy sources capable of delivering power in previously unimaginable and seemingly endless quantities. Coal, oil, and natural gas enabled the development of transport technologies (steamships, railroads, cars, trucks, and airplanes) that overcame prior limits to the speed of travel and trade, so that products and resources that were abundant in one place could be transported to places where they were scarce. Fossil fuels could be used to increase the rates of resource extraction via powered mining machinery, and to process lower grades of ores as more concentrated ores were depleted. They could be fashioned into plastics and chemicals to substitute for some natural materials that were getting scarce, such as hardwoods and whale oil. And they could be made into artificial fertilizers, which could replace soil nutrients lost due to unsustainable agricultural practices. All these developments together enabled population growth at rates that far outstripped historic trends: human numbers expanded from one billion to eight billion in a mere two centuries. We were, in effect, stretching existing constraints on population and consumption to the point that it was difficult for many people to see that boundaries still existed at all."

"As we’ve grown our population and our per capita consumption rates, we’ve been taking habitat away from other organisms. As a result, nature is in full retreat. Vertebrate and invertebrate animal species have suffered average population declines of 70 percent in the past 50 years, and thousands of plant species are endangered as well."

"For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success."

"It’s sad when loved ones die, and few of us look forward to our own demise; hence the perennial quest for an elixir of eternal life, or at least a cure for cancer. But if nobody died, the planet would quickly fill with humans and empty of all the things that feed and provision us. Death clears space for new life; it is the non-negotiable price of admission to the great banquet of existence."

"The past few thousand years of human history have already seen several critical accelerators. The creation of the first monetary systems roughly 5,000 years ago enabled a rapid expansion of trade that ultimately culminated in our globalized financial system. Metal weapons made warfare deadlier, leading to the takeover of less-well-armed human societies by kingdoms and empires with metallurgy. Communication tools (including writing, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, television, the internet, and social media) amplified the power of some people to influence the minds of others. And, in the past century or two, the adoption of fossil fuels facilitated resource extraction, manufacturing, food production, and transportation, enabling rapid economic expansion and population growth. Of those four past accelerators, our adoption of fossil fuels was the most potent and problematic. In just two centuries, energy usage per capita has increased eightfold, as has the size of the human population. The period since 1950, which has seen a dramatic increase in the global reliance on petroleum, has also seen the fastest economic and population growth in all of human history. Indeed, historians call it the “Great Acceleration.” Neoliberal economists hail the Great Acceleration as a success story, but its bills are just starting to come due. Industrial agriculture is destroying Earth’s topsoil at a rate of tens of billions of tons per year. Wild nature is in retreat, with animal species having lost, on average, 70 percent of their numbers in the past half-century. And we’re altering the planetary climate in ways that will have catastrophic repercussions for future generations. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole human enterprise has grown too big, and that it is turning nature (“resources”) into waste and pollution far too quickly to sustain itself. The evidence suggests we need to slow down, and, in some cases at least, reverse course by reducing population, consumption, and waste."

"Depleting and climate-changing coal, oil, and natural gas have brought about dramatic human population growth, along with immense profits and unprecedented wealth (for the few). But all of these presumed and probably transitory benefits have been based on depleting natural resources, and on processes that are perilously changing the climate and degrading ecosystems across the planet. Every time we pick up a gasoline-powered machine we are viscerally linked to that chain of ersatz benefits and spiraling impacts."

"Of course, we also have to think about the role of population going forward. The more the global population grows, the more difficult this challenge will be. As we approach this question, it's crucial—as always—that we focus on underlying structural drivers. Many women around the world do not have control over their bodies and the number of children they have. Even in liberal nations, women come under heavy social pressure to reproduce, often to the point where those who choose to have fewer or no children are interrogated and stigmatised. Poverty exacerbates these problems... And of course capitalism itself creates pressures for population growth: more people means more labour, cheaper labour, and more consumers. These pressures filter into our culture, and even into national policy: countries like France and Japan are offering incentives to get women to have more children, to keep their economies growing."

"No one lives within a day’s walk of a coal mine, an iron ore source, and a smelter that can operate without a source of electricity, plus food. The old smelters didn’t use electricity to drive the huge motors moving heavy hot metal and slag around. The first smelters were close to coal and iron ore sources, but we used them up; they no longer exist close to each other. In the year 1500, we had a world population of around 450 million and grew massively over the next 250 years to the start of the industrial revolution by increasingly using the resources of the ‘new world’. We’ve been on an upward trajectory ever since, especially since around 1800 when fossil energy came into use. People just don’t understand our extreme (and still growing) overpopulation problem given the imminent decline of oil, and especially diesel. Assuming “we’ll downsize this” or “relocalize that” ignores the fact that once oil supply shifts to contraction, the declines will be permanent year after year, and with diesel shortages the ability to build anything new all but disappears. It will be a sad sight with suffering everywhere and increasing year after year. Survivors will have to be hard people, protecting and providing for their own, at the exclusion of others. Everyone should look around their home and imagine it without the oil used to produce and deliver everything in it, because that’s the world of the future, with old decaying cold buildings and no food in cities."

"Using all available resources to expand its population is what every species that’s ever existed has always done until some limit is reached. Consider a mouse plague, enabled by human agricultural practices, with its huge population until the next frost or the grain is eaten, then a massive die-off in a short time."

"We have over 8 billion humans on the planet, and 99.99% of them have no idea modernity is going to end abruptly, and when it does so will destroy the plans of the [few who] did see it coming and tried to prepare in some way."

"One might think Humanity’s success is guaranteed, except for a few things: First, the increasing scarcity of oil, coal, and natural gas suddenly threatens to remove the punch bowl from which Humanity has been feeding. Second, the carrying capacity of the Earth is far less than 8 billion humans unless we continue to supplement with increasingly scarce resources. And, last, our centuries-long party has now broken the Earth in ways Humanity cannot repair."

"Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries? U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated—at least with the “wrong kind” of people. As Microsoft philanthropist... Bill Gates has explained: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge.” His lobbying foundation’s 2018 “Goalkeepers” report warned: “According to U.N. data, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. Its population is projected to double by 2050,” with “more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people... in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.” Gates advocates cutting this projected population increase by 30 percent by improving access to birth control and expanding education to “enable more girls and women to stay in school longer, have children later.” But how can that be afforded with this summer’s looming food and oil squeeze on government budgets?"

"Perhaps the most ambiguous of these [technological] achievements [of the industrial age] is the one that began in mid-nineteenth century with improvements in public health, vaccinations, and antibiotics. These methods of death control emerged too rapidly to be offset by methods of birth control and populations exploded. Again, who can speak against this from within the old paradigm? In fact, it is only from the newer ecological paradigm that we are able to recognize that all this marvelous technology has... likely led the human population to overshoot the carrying capacity of the earth. Even from this perspective many of us would... want to save lives now in hopes that somehow there will be enough resources for those who come after us. In less complex animal populations, an overshoot leads to a crash, or die-off. Can humans somehow circumvent this conclusion without relying on further damaging drawdown strategies? … a basic change in our technologies, and acceptance of a steady state in economics reinforced by a compatible spiritual orientation, may at least mitigate human suffering and loss."

"Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims."

"We have learned a lot in the 50 years since "" was published. We should not shy away from discussing what actions are ethically permissible to facilitate a stable level of population growth, nor should we leave this discussion in the hands of the affluent. The conversation about ethics, population, and reproduction needs to shift from the perspective of white donor countries to the places and people most affected by poverty, climate change and environmental degradation."

"All we can say now is, that, even now, 600 persons could easily live on a square mile; and that … 1,000 human beings—not idlers—living on 1,000 acres could easily, without … overwork, obtain … a luxurious vegetable and animal food, as well as the flax, wool, silk and hides necessary for their clothing. As to what may be obtained under still more perfect methods—also known but not yet tested on a large scale—is better to abstain from any forecast: so unexpected are the recent achievements of intensive culture. We thus see that the over-population fallacy does not stand the very first attempt at submitting it to a closer examination."

"It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was roughly about when the industrial adventure began to gain traction. It has been inferred from this that a billion people is about the limit that the planet Earth can support when it is run on a nonindustrial basis. World population is now past six and a half billion, having more than doubled since my childhood in the 1950s. The mid-twentieth century was a time of rising anxiety over the “population explosion.” The marvelous technological victory over food shortages, including the “green revolution” in crop yields, accelerated that already robust leap in world population that had begun with modernity. Dramatic improvements in sanitation and medicine extended lives. Industry sopped up expanding populations and reassigned them from rural lands to work in the burgeoning cities. The perceived ability of the world to accommodate these newcomers and latecomers in a wholly new disposition of social and economic arrangements seemed [to] be the final nail in the coffin of Thomas Robert Malthus…"

"Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but... [hydrocarbons] ...skewed the [supply-demand] equation over the past [two] hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of [a fraction of] nonrenewable condensed solar energy accumulated over eons of prehistory. The “green revolution” in boosting crop yields was minimally about scientific innovation in crop genetics and mostly about dumping massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides made... of ...[petroleum] onto crops, as well as employing irrigation at a fantastic scale made possible by abundant oil and gas. The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plen[t]itude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years. Within that comfortable bubble, the idea took hold that only grouches, spoilsports, and godless maniacs considered population hypergrowth a problem [with a direct solution], and that to even raise the issue was indecent. ...As oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves arc toward depletion, we will indeed suddenly be left with an enormous surplus population... that the ecology of the earth will not support. No political program of birth control will avail. The people are already here. The journey back to non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hypergrowth was simply a side effect of the oil age. It was [more of] a condition [without a remedy], not a problem with a [direct] solution. That is what happened, and we are stuck with it."

"Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "green revolution" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized… diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children… survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over… the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn’t compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland’s oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies."

"Peak human population will surely lag … peak oil and peak mineral resources until these conditions express themselves as food shortages. This means that the human population will continue to rise for a while, even as we begin to encounter these … strict resource limits. It’s not possible to estimate how much the population will increase because the relationship between energy and mineral resources and food production is a very fragile equation, subject to any number of discontinuities. To these, add the complications of weather disasters arising from climate change, including drought, the spread of plant diseases, and so forth. This lagging further rise in [the] human population will only make the inevitable contraction more acute once food shortages begin. [Overpopulation] amounts to a human population overshoot … to the planet Earth’s ecology. We're putting a strain on everything the earth has to offer us. While the combination of peak stuff and [too many] billion humans is forcing the issue, ...the truth is that circumstances will now determine what happens, not policies or personalities. … Population overshoot is therefore unlikely to yield to management. Rather, the usual suspects will enter the scene and do their thing: starvation, disease, … violence … [and] death."

"Fossil fuels’ biggest impact on the agricultural sector stems from the use of natural gas in industrial fertilizer production. Industrial fertilizer was first mass-produced in 1914 using what came to be known as the . This invention enabled the , a boom in agricultural production that took place in the latter half of the 20th century, starting in Mexico and India. From 1961 to 2010, cereal yields per acre increased by 217 percent in Mexico and 183 percent in India. It is no coincidence that the human population has more than quadrupled since 1920. We often attribute the Green Revolution to the spread of high-yielding crop varieties. Yet these varieties typically require industrial fertilizer application. The Haber-Bosch method, combined with mechanization and pesticides derived from fossil fuels, [has] represented a massive and unsustainable injection of fossil fuels into our food system. Today, the production of one food calorie in the United States requires 2.7 fossil fuel calories."

"Driven by the Anthropocene engine, human population has grown exponentially, and individual societies have approached collapse multiple times over the past 8,000 years. The disappearance of the Easter Island civilization and the collapse of the Mayan empire, for example, have been linked to the depletion of environmental resources as populations rose. The dramatic decline of the European population during the Black Death in the 1300s was a direct consequence of crowded and unsanitary living conditions that facilitated the spread of Yersenia pestis, or plague."

"In the 20th century we decisively broke our dependence on energy systems that were fed by the wind and sun and which we supplemented with human and animal muscle power. That leap was made possible by innovations that allowed us to extract, pump, use, and transform raw materials, particularly to unlock energy stored in coal and oil to make chemicals and plastics. That in turn allowed a massive expansion in population, lifespans, and economic growth. The rise of industrial capitalism from 1851 to 1971 went hand in hand with a surge in population, mainly in cities, provided with better food and public health."

"On a global level, there is no threat to human survival greater than that posed by world overpopulation—paradoxical though that may seem—and it is abundantly clear that consensus decision making is ineffective for dealing with that. Some kind of “solution” is nonetheless unavoidable, and is certain to be ugly. To say that there is no visible world leadership on that transcendental question is to understate the case. Optimists on the population problem don’t measure progress in terms of a decrease in population, or even a decrease in the rate of increase, but in terms of a decrease in the rate of increase of the rate of increase."

"The human population will continue to increase until it can’t. When it can no longer increase, it will crash. Our extreme efforts to focus our minds elsewhere are symptoms of a desperate attempt to find solid footing, to believe in a future that will not vanish. Mankind has had a storied existence on Earth. Our thirst for knowledge and innovation has provided comfort and security. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that our remarkable progress has become our worst enemy. We know our planet is finite. Images of Earth from space make it plain for all to see. However, people routinely ignore this verifiable certainty in all aspects of their lives, treating the world as [if it were] infinite. Modern-day human activities are not only wiping out ecosystems and biodiversity but [also] plundering the clean air, water, and topsoil that helped bring about our tenure on the planet. Entire ecosystems have vanished, including the tallgrass prairie in North America, Madagascar’s rainforests, and the Aral Sea in Asia. We use Earth’s natural resources like a bunch of drunks on the greatest bender of all time. Human consumption is negatively modifying the planet and permanently damaging the biological systems upon which our continued existence depends. The deterioration of our ecosphere has been exponentially accelerating for at least 100,000 years. As technological advances improve our lives, humanity becomes increasingly detached from its environment and the natural resources allowing us to persist. People now have a much closer affinity with iPhones, Amazon, online shopping, restaurants and bars, Netflix, beauty salons, and sporting events than forests, grasslands, marshes, and oceans. Few now understand our existence on Earth is entirely dependent upon photosynthesis. Instead, they believe their survival is contingent on parents, doctors, farmers, governments, bankers, police, and other players in society. It’s not that those institutions, people, and specialties aren’t important, but they represent the retailers. Photosynthesis is the wholesaler. There is a supply chain disruption occurring on a massive scale in our relationship with the planet. The ancient forests and grasslands that provided the planet with free oxygen in the air and sequestered carbon dioxide, making it habitable for humans and other complex life, are nearly gone. For most people, the natural resources that support their existence and lifestyle might as well be from a distant galaxy. This extreme disconnect has resulted in people losing their capacity to understand the dire circumstances facing complex organisms on Earth, including themselves. The deafening alarm bells portending our extinction are routinely misunderstood or ignored. For those who perceive our state of crisis, there is a great deal of angst. Much of the frustration, anger, and sadness results from having unrealistic expectations of human beings. Despite our advanced technologies, the basic tenets of human behavior haven’t changed for centuries or millennia. Letting go of the false expectations that Homo sapiens can or will modify our behavior can bring us an element of peace. Expectations are incredibly powerful in structuring our moods and emotions. Identifying unrealistic expectations can reduce our chances of being disappointed and can increase happiness. A better understanding of our behavioral history can provide valuable insights into recognizing human capabilities and limitations."

"… as our population has grown, humans have been liquidating the planet’s natural resources for thousands of years. The effects of our current population on forests, grasslands, biodiversity, clean air, and water are catastrophic. Zero population growth means the planet would still be trying to support the current population, over 8 billion people. Humanity can no longer pay even the interest. We’ve already spent much of the planet’s clean air, water, and biodiversity with no mechanism for repayment. Zero population growth isn’t going to happen. We can’t curb our evolutionarily programmed need to grow and reproduce any more than we can stop the sun from rising. Like all populations of organisms on the planet, the number of humans will continue to increase until it’s no longer possible. When that day happens, Earth will be a truly inhospitable place."

"In 1968, with the release of their book The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich were among the first to identify the most significant factor that will precipitate the collapse of humanity. Their book inspired an environmentalist fad in the 1970s. The premise for the book was gradually rationalized away by most as the work of lunatics. It was listed by the Intercollegiate Review as one of the 50 worst books of the 20th century. In the Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” it garnered an 11th-place honorable mention. Since that time, the global population has more than doubled. During those five decades, humanity has identified six types of quarks, developed the modern internet, eradicated smallpox, decoded the human genome, and developed vaccines for Ebola and COVID-19. Despite all our new technologies and discoveries, the most basic concept of rapid human growth inside a finite system—our planet—leading to collapse is a concept too difficult for our greatest minds to reconcile. Humanity’s carefully calibrated psychological filters go into overdrive to prevent this simple mathematical postulate from entering our psyche. As seemingly prescient as the Ehrlichs were, our collision course with extinction was preordained long before their book was published in 1968."

"Population growth vanished from the agendas of mainstream environmental organizations that previously regarded escalating numbers as a major environmental threat. These groups were primarily shackled by their fear of alienating donors, ultimately selling their purpose and integrity for money. Criticism from progressive and conservative interests claiming that overpopulation is a myth further incentivized these groups to pretend the rising global population wasn’t a factor in planetary degradation."

"Those who defend the belief that overpopulation isn’t at the core of every environmental problem are not unique. Every myth presents itself as an authoritative, factual account, no matter how much the topic varies from natural law or ordinary experience. There is a long, bloody history of Homo sapiens defending myths against those who might either question their veracity or have a competing myth. It has resulted in the deaths of millions of people [and other animals] since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. As a result of ignoring the obvious reality, newborns are effectively positioned as moneymaking machines. The former prime minister of Japan suggested that women who bore no children should be barred from receiving pensions. In most countries, those who choose not to have children are required to pay for those who do through taxes. In this campaign for more babies, childbearing is reduced to a means for economic growth. Even though overpopulation, natural resource extraction, and environmental degradation are clearly linked, the needs of the economic market trump the needs of the planet. Children are nothing more than moneymakers in the eyes of politicians, forever blind to the moral, environmental, or humanitarian consequences of their policies. Market thinking has obliterated moral thinking on a grand scale. After all, if the West doesn’t produce more children, it can’t produce the wealth needed to look after parents when they retire. No social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs. No pika cares about the interests of the pika species; no northern spotted owl will lift a feather for the global northern spotted owl community; no wolf alpha male makes a bid for becoming the king of all wolves. Likewise, few humans care about the interests of Homo sapiens. People only care about themselves and those who directly affect their lives."

"Humanity has moved past the point where future generations are an issue. If there are any, they will be few in number. Ignoring the inevitable is something all species do. Humans are no different than bacteria in a Petri dish or a mountain pine beetle in a climate-stressed lodgepole pine forest. All available resources are utilized to grow and reproduce until the inevitable collapse. We’re traveling down the same path as all species that have gone through exponential increases. The only difference is Homo sapiens is doing it on a grander scale. The Herculean ability to ignore the greatest threat to our existence would be comical if not for the rapidly approaching consequential conclusion to our existence."

"Economic and political instability will continue to increase as food and water supplies are impacted in more areas on the planet by pollution, drought, flooding, and other extreme weather events. However, while the focus is almost entirely on the supply side of the economic equation, the demand side may be the bigger issue. The planet is currently adding an additional 80 million mouths to feed each year, 4.5 times more people than the entire population of Syria. As the chasm between uncertain supplies and increasing demand widens, the social and biological implications for humanity are both unpredictable and alarming."

"Many people, including environmentalists, often avoid linking the multitude of environmental problems to overpopulation. Some believe that a global shift to veganism could support the current population and more. Others attribute the crisis to various factors [that] are frequently cited as primary contributors to the ongoing environmental crisis, overshadowing the impact of population growth."

"[There's an] excessive number of humans who [want to] live a lifestyle that promotes equality, along with [others] being minimalist and/or vegan... [and] similar overpopulation by other organisms is considered a plague."

"Our emphasis [on] science has resulted in alarming rises in world populations that demand an ever-increasing emphasis [on] science to improve their standards and maintain their vigor."

"It is still the case that the worst enemies of life are, on the one hand, an excess of life (human life, in particular) and, on the other, the legislation and structure of societies based on . The sturdier a society, the more peaceful it is; the more efficient (i.e., the ransacking of natural resources), the quicker . Everything that upsets the established order of society, causing chaos and panic, gives time to nature and, ultimately, humans too."

"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, Subsistence, increases only in an arithmetical ratio."

"The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

"What has caused the recent super-exponential rise in world population? Before the industrial revolution both fertility and mortality were comparatively high and irregular. The birth rate generally exceeded the death rate only slightly, and population grew exponentially, but at a very slow and uneven rate. In 1650 the average lifetime of most populations in the world was only about 30 years. Since then, [hu]mankind has developed many practices that have had profound effects on the population growth system, especially on mortality rates. With the spread of modern medicine, public health techniques, and new methods of growing and distributing foods, death rates have fallen around the world. […] On a world average the gain around the positive feedback loop (fertility) has decreased only slightly while the gain around the negative feedback loop (mortality) is decreasing. The result is an increasing dominance of the positive feedback loop and the sharp exponential rise in population […]."

"H. sapiens took around 250,000 years to reach a global population of 1 billion in 1820, and just over 200 years to go from 1 billion to 8 billion. This was largely made possible by our species’ access to cheap, easy, exosomatic energy, mainly fossil fuels. Fossil fuels enabled us to reduce negative feedback (e.g. food shortages) and thus delay and evade the consequences of surpassing natural limits. In that same 200 year period, fossil energy (FF) use increased 1300-fold, fueling a 100-fold increase in real gross world product, i.e. consumption, and the human enterprise is still expanding exponentially."

"There is no way we could keep going as we have been. The increase in human population in the 1990s has exceeded the total population in 1600. The population has grown more since 1950 than it did during the previous four million years. The reasons for our recent rapid growth are pretty clear. Although the Industrial Revolution speeded historical growth rates considerably, it was really the public health revolution, and its spread to the Third World at the end of the Second World War, that set us galloping. Vaccines and antibiotics came all at once, and right behind came population. In Sri Lanka in the late 1940s life expectancy was rising at least a year every twelve months. How much difference did this make? Consider the United States: if people died throughout this century at the same rate as they did at its beginning, America's population would be 140 million, not 270 million."

"The Earth's population is plagued by famines, energy shortages, epidemics, environmental pollution, degeneration, terrorism, dictatorship, anarchism, slavery, excessive increase of waste materials, racial hatred, food shortages, destruction of rain forests, the "greenhouse effect", pollution of lakes, streams and oceans, hatred towards asylum-seekers; radioactive emissions, chemical pollution of water, air, plants, food, human beings and animals. Crime, murder, mass murders, manslaughter; alcoholism, hatred of strangers, oppression, hatred of one's fellowman, extremism, sectarianism, drug addiction, overpopulation, annihilation of animal species, war, violence, torture and capital punishment, general mismanagement, water contamination, eradication of plant species; hatred, vice, jealousy, lovelessness, lack of logic, false humanitarianism, lack of housing, increased traffic, destruction of arable land, unemployment, the collapse of health care, the collapse of care for the elderly, destruction of nature, the collapse of solid waste removal, and the lack of living space, among others. In spite of the many efforts, mankind's problems are not decreasing but, instead, continue to rise steadily in direct proportion to population increases."

"… technology use harnesses far more energy and materials than we could ever manage without it, and while doing so may make our lives much easier and more comfortable, it comes at the cost of increasing ecological overshoot. As we increase overshoot, we concomitantly increase all the symptom predicaments that overshoot causes. Technology use also has another nasty side effect. It reduces and/or eliminates negative feedbacks which once kept our numbers in check. Many diseases we once suffered from like smallpox, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, etc. have been temporarily eliminated by the technological development of vaccines. Our medical industry has also wiped out many other diseases through proper sanitation, use of antiseptics, anesthetics (allowing surgeries to correct most internal ailments), antibiotics, antifungals, and antivirals to kill or prevent many diseases, and many other innovations that allow us to live better, more comfortable lives. The development of indoor plumbing, electrical systems, heating and air conditioning systems, insulation, refrigerators and freezers, and cooking devices all allow us to accomplish daily tasks either much easier or provide more comfort to us by regulating temperature and humidity levels in our living spaces. Therefore, technology use reduces or removes negative feedback thereby promoting population growth which also promotes technology growth. However, in terms of reducing overshoot (and symptom predicaments such as climate change, energy and resource decline, pollution loading, and biodiversity decline), technology use is maladaptive. This will become painfully clear as time moves forward when more or different technology does not actually solve overshoot. Population decline is what will actually work to reduce overshoot, caused by the failure of our agricultural systems, increased disease caused by antimicrobial resistance and new viruses emerging, and increased failures of infrastructural systems caused by extreme weather events. Reduced technology use will be facilitated by this mechanism, and ALL species wind up experiencing die-off whether they use technology or not."

"Most non-domesticated life on earth is in decline and about 200 species a day are going extinct due to a wide range of environmental problems. Many humans are at risk of being harmed or killed by related problems this century. All of the many problems are caused by the same thing: humans have used non-renewable energy to explode their population from 1 billion to 7 billion in 100 years, and now consume so large a share of the earth’s resources that almost all non-domesticated species are in decline."

"We’re in serious trouble. Many red lights are flashing on the dashboard. Most people are now aware that something is seriously wrong, and each has their favorite lens through which to view the problems… The common denominator to all of these problems is overshoot. Very few people are able to see through the lens of overshoot because overshoot is a very unpleasant topic with no painless solutions and no way to avoid its consequences, and because humans evolved to deny unpleasant realities like overshoot."

"Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year, while numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals."

"Baconian science is at the root of the apocalypse. We have been blessed by advances in medicine, agriculture and engineering. Science has done exactly what we asked of it and now we are set for annihilation. If European science had petered out after the discoveries of the seventeenth century, we would be less numerous and [the] Earth would not be warming."

"This moment is special because we have dramatically built up our population, technology, science, medicine, and democratic institutions as a direct result of vast amounts of surplus energy stemming from a one-time resource. The fossil fuel experience has made us dangerously confident about our cleverness and dominance over nature. What makes this century special, then, is that we will have to cope with a diminishing supply rate of the resource that has been of paramount importance to our high-tech existence."

"Humans collectively must ultimately face the uncomfortable question of whether Earth’s natural systems can support 8 billion or more people at a modern standard of living. Since the resource footprint of a U.S. citizen is at least four times that of the global average, the key question is whether the planet can support an increase in material throughput four times higher than present when the strain is apparent already. As noble as it may be to wish [for] a modern living standard for an eventual ten billion or more people, it is likely that committing to such a course could result in more human suffering than would transpire under the adoption of more modest goals. The responsible path is to reduce global resource dependencies and abandon the imperative for growth starting now."

"Even something as seemingly altruistic as health care selfishly focuses on human health, to the exclusion and often direct detriment of ecosystem health. Are we really doing ourselves favors in the long term by making the destructive human enterprise healthier, more populous, longer-living, and therefore better able to carry out its damaging activities? If this sounds abhorrently anti-human, it’s because the human enterprise is currently relentlessly anti-planet. Anything that is anti-planet will dismantle ecosystems that serve as critical life support for humans, spelling failure for the human enterprise. So it’s really the human enterprise that is anti-human by way of being anti-planet. […] The best way to assure long-term prosperity is to forge a non-human-centric partnership with nature that does not always put short-term human interests above those of non-human elements of nature. Even “good” activities like health care therefore miss the boat in terms of building a better tomorrow."

"Since growth is an absurd short-lived anomaly, what about leveling out in population, resource use per capita, and adopting a steady-state economy? The problem here is that the rate at which we are depleting one-time resources today is unsustainable. We’re simply spending our bank account without paying attention to the balance and without any source of additional income. Most clearly, forests and wild spaces are down by a factor of two in the last 60 years and will be gone within 60 years at current rates of depletion. Before even getting to steady-state conditions, inevitable near-term increases in population together with sought-after increases in standards of living around the world spell an even shorter lifetime for critical habitats. Meanwhile, fisheries are failing in domino fashion; aquifers are being depleted at rates alarmingly higher than replacement; soils are degrading and arable land is lost; fertilizer depends on a finite resource; habitat loss is resulting in species extinctions far in excess of natural rates. Even the plunder of mineral resources in the seemingly infinite crust is getting harder, only a fleeting century or so into our spree. Sustaining present levels for even a few more centuries is a dubious (i.e., unsubstantiated) proposition. It is practically absurd to imagine sustaining present practices for 10,000 years. Humans simply have not yet demonstrated an ability to maintain a technological society without utter reliance on grossly unsustainable inheritance spending."

"Earth has never in its history had to contend with 8 billion fire apes, intelligent enough to have leveraged power by exploiting and burning one-time resources. We now operate outside the bounds and protections of evolution: in breach of contract, without a map to success. What could possibly convince us that this fireworks show—which has not even come close to standing the test of time—can maintain anything like its current resource impact for the long haul? Humans have demonstrated convincingly that we can live in a primitive state for hundreds of thousands of years. Our present mode is a few-century flash, supported almost entirely by inheritance-spending. Arguing that we have found a new normal is a precarious position that I would not be eager to defend. Parties end. Fireworks shows end. Why would our flash be any different? It’s not just guesswork: what other outcome could result from rapid resource exploitation on a finite planet?"

"We face unprecedented pressures on resources and on our environment, as human population and standard of living both surge on a finite planet. Nature will not allow this trend to continue indefinitely."

"Human population will not be allowed to grow [indefinitely]. Even small growth rates will step up pressure on natural resources, and Earth can only support so much, long-term. Independent of what the “right” number is, once settled, we will not be able to dial it up without imperiling the hard-won success. Even under steady human population, any increase in resource use per person will also not be compatible. In general, growth leads to a dead end: to failure."

"As a jarring illustration of our tendency to value the human side over the prerequisite physical/ecological side, imagine that somehow we manage to emerge from the coming centuries having established a truly sustainable existence. All resources are renewed by nature at the rate of extraction for human needs; population is steady and at a level just tolerable to the planet in terms of indefinite support. Diverse ecosystems are left to thrive in their natural states. But imagine that we are still plagued by cancer and other maladies, so that life expectancy is, say, 90 years. Then what if a team of researchers hits on a cure for (most forms of) cancer? Hurray! At last! Unambiguously good, right? Well, not so fast. All other elements held the same, longer life spans translate to a higher population, putting additional resource burdens on the planet that it cannot handle in the long term. In order to adopt and implement the cure for cancer, we would have to either deliberately reduce population or lower the standard of living to accommodate the change. All other considerations of the complex society about economic impacts, equity of distribution, legal and political facets, or interaction with religious belief systems must take a back seat to the most fundamental and important question: is this change physically viable on this finite planet in the long term?"

"People tend to prefer the narrative that we, ourselves, are the superheroes, and that our superpowers are not from the fossil fuel suit, but are cognitive in nature. Yet we have the same neural hardware (if not slightly downsized) as our prehistoric ancestors. The main cognitive revolution happened about 70,000 years ago when humans started to believe in things that do not exist (like spirits or potential future gains) that allowed large-scale coordination and shared identity to outcompete evolution’s more biophysical tricks of sharp teeth/claws, speed, strength, camouflage, poison, or overwhelming numbers. Global spread of homo sapiens and megafauna extinctions quickly followed, and it is at this point that the human experiment began to smolder: something was off. About 10,000 years ago, agriculture started and the first visible flame ignited. About 300–400 years ago, the Enlightenment lit a fuse by developing a scientific approach to understanding the world. It was not long before the fuse found fossil fuels and we now witness the predictable explosion that ensued. The explosion is breathtakingly rapid on any meaningful timeline, only appearing in slow motion to the few generations experiencing the phenomenon and thus seeming “normal.” So we can trace some part of our current planetary dominance to human ingenuity, but perhaps the lion’s share actually is attributable to the energy bonanza—as suggested by the dramatic change in the pace of innovation before and after the fossil transition."

"A plausible scenario for ecosystem collapse... is based on the fact that we currently support 8 billion people on a fossil-intense agricultural system. We have over-leveraged that finite resource to "borrow" millions of years of eco-services (photosynthetic energy) and now host a population that probably never could have existed in ecological equilibrium. Even if fossil fuels were not going away, it seems likely we would see continued erosion of the globe's ability to support this current unsustainable mode. We have already lost about half of the wild animal life in my lifetime: is that halfway to collapse? Take away the fossil fuels, and I imagine over-hunting and rapid deforestation will take an enormous toll on ecosystem health."

"[It] is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor."

"The dream of eventually having 10 billion people living at American standards completely ignores the glaring fact that we seem to be circling the drain even at today’s impact level (i.e., overshoot). How could we possibly entertain the factor-of-five increase in resource demand that would accompany a realization of “the dream?” It seems delusional… and likely to turn into a nightmare if pursued."

"Human population is going up… We’re not exactly doing the planet (or ultimately ourselves) any favors presently. Will adding more humans that subscribe to our current cultural model somehow make the situation better? Will improving standards of living (thus increasing resource demand) mysteriously turn things around? It’s hard to see how—not without enacting a whole new model."

"Increasing the standard of living of a growing population makes today’s ecological pressures look adorable."

"It is easy to get caught up in the heady whirlwinds of modernity. We have accomplished amazing feats in these past few centuries, and our extrapolative minds envision a continued acceleration. Given that our life span overlaps only a portion of the tale, it is easy to lose the context that our boom (the Industrial Revolution and what followed) is almost entirely due to fossil fuels. This energy surge in turn powered a surge in material access and economic activity (and human population) in what is perhaps fittingly described as a fireworks show."

"What did we do with our fossil fuel bonanza? We exploded population by revolutionizing agriculture [and health]. Now when fossil fuels inevitably (and soon?) decline, we’re left with an overhang that can no longer be supported. The resulting population decline will suddenly cast Malthus in a new light: oh what a starry-eyed soothe-sayer [sic]! When that day comes, […] realize that it’s no more tragic than the ant colony waning as it must."

"Our fossil fuel bonanza has left our ecosystem in a perilous state. We have destroyed vast forests and habitats, polluted water and soil, kicked off a rapid climate trend that natural systems may not adapt to quickly enough, and basically overrun the planet."

"…fossil fuels allowed us to drastically overshoot the natural carrying capacity of the planet, and that bill will come due when the underlying resource inevitably dwindles. Sometimes simple is simply right."

"The human explosion has accelerated across the millennia, most recently reaching a fever pitch owing to the employment of fossil fuels—leveraging stored solar energy about a million times faster than it was created. The ensuing access to minerals and ability to transform landscapes has rapidly and radically altered our world within just a few human generations."

"In 1800, every human on the planet had a corresponding 80 kg of mammal mass in the wild. Wildland mammals outweighed humans in an 80:50 ratio. Today, each human on the planet can only point to 2.5 kg of wild mammal mass as their “own.” Let that sink in. You only have 2.5 kg (less than 6 pounds) of wild mammal out there somewhere. A single pet cat or dog generally weighs more. Not that long ago, it was more than you could carry. Now, it seems like hardly anything! I especially fear the implications for mammals should global food distribution be severely crippled."

"As if the Enlightenment was not enough, in quick succession we joined another enormous river. One could say that the process of science opened the door to fossil fuels, but science and fossil fuels might be best described as a dynamic duo. Fossil fuels gave us the power to advance our science-amplified degree of control to an entirely new level. Resources that had been previously inaccessible became available. It became far easier to clear land for agriculture and other uses. We learned to make fertilizer from methane, unleashing unprecedented agricultural surpluses that inevitably resulted in a human population overshoot. Fossil-fueled furnaces led to steel, concrete, and other materials on a massive scale, paving the way to megacities and global trade. Science itself was amplified by having access to fossil fuels, via a flood of new devices and capabilities invented with—and powered by—cheap energy. Advances in science and technology in turn allowed greater access to buried fossil energy. This positive feedback arrangement facilitated runaway expansion of the [human] enterprise, leading to a battery of hockey stick curves."

"Energy has been fundamental to our story of growth. The various hockey stick curves over the last century or so are a reflection of energy and population. What’s more, human population itself is a reflection of energy, as mechanized, fertilized agriculture was made possible by fossil fuels. Since energy per capita has also increased like a hockey stick, the ecological impact (and many other metrics like GDP) takes on the shape of a super-exponential (still resembling a hockey stick on a logarithmic plot)."

"We have used [fossil fuels] to expand the human enterprise and population, knock down forests, destroy and fragment habitats, drive extinctions, and generally threaten the vitality of the planet. [But] “solving” the energy problem as fossil fuels give out is pretty frightening: how would it not simply perpetuate the ecological nosedive we have initiated? Only if we put ecological concerns above energy do we stand any chance of survival."

"I acknowledge that cancer is a class of disease, and no universal cure is likely to emerge. But feel free to substitute any longstanding cause of death. […] In a sense, it is death that makes life special and worthy of celebration. […] What would a successful cure look like? Human lifespans would increase. All other things being equal, a reduced death rate means more humans on the planet, putting additional pressures on the entire community of life and further threatening the vitality of the planet—including humans, to be clear. Moreover, access to the cure would almost certainly be more available to the affluent half, who are already heavy users of resources and thus cause outsized harm to the planet. So a cure to cancer would serve to boost ecological destruction, in practice."

"Truly, the end of modernity will probably be brutal for most of the 8 billion people on the planet, who will cling to what they know and fail to adapt. But even if they were mentally ready, the Earth is not ready to support 8 billion humans without a massive fossil subsidy, so human population will likely fall a lot in hard times."

"Compared to biologically relevant timescales, the human explosion commenced just “yesterday” when grain agriculture began taking root... set[ting] the stage for planet-crushing present-day human populations in a time that is still contextually short. Each “improvement” like cities and technology only accelerated the rapidity of the unsustainable ascent. Mounting ecological damage was part and parcel of this expansionist story long before cars, planes, and smartphones arrived—like two sides of a coin."

"Humans are voracious (big brains to feed and a lot of un-furry surface area to keep warm), and therefore are ecologically expensive. If the Earth tightens its belt, [one should]n’t assume that humans will fare well. We are summer children borne of “good” times, where “good” translates to “biodiverse.” Cleverness is no guarantee against starvation, as countless clever humans who have starved can’t tell [us]."

"[Our] success [in eliminating hunger and inequity] inevitably grows the population, scaling up the current tension... to planetary limits... [and] curing all diseases and achieving effective immortality would be ecologically disastrous!"

"Since the current low levels of mortality go hand-in-hand with ecological devastation and a doomed modernity, their embrace is itself a problem…"

"The Green Revolution transformed agriculture by inserting fossil fuels at every turn. Fertilizer came from natural gas. Diesel allowed large-scale mechanization of plowing, planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting large amounts of food. Petrochemical pesticides smote economically worthless (but ecologically invaluable) products of evolution into the foul dust. We fed a growing human population, now 8 billion strong. It boils down to a diet of fossil fuels: again, temporary."

"To those who resist the notion that increasing food production also means increasing human population, consider this. In 1950, the global population stood at about 2.5 billion people. The Green Revolution was about to explode into global agriculture, substantially increasing crop yields on the back of profligate fossil fuel inputs (for fertilizer, mechanization, energy for irrigation, transport, processing, etc.). Let’s say this tsunami of energy and technology had not arrived on the agricultural scene, and that moreover a global edict (“magically” followed) held annual food production at the 1950 level thereafter. Would we have 8 billion people today? Impossible. We would still have 2.5 billion, correct? In 1950, the world produced enough food for 2.5 billion people, so that same amount of annual food would sustain 2.5 billion people today…or perhaps 2 billion taller, heavier people; or 3 billion people with more equitable, modest distribution and less waste. But you get the point: hold the food supply steady and you essentially hold the population below some cap. Inarguable. Those additional 5.5 billion people were made possible by a technological wave of food increase."

"[Eight] billion humans are driving a sixth mass extinction, which leaves no room for even 10 humans if fully realized, let alone 10¹⁰."

"Maintaining 8 billion human people on Earth [without fossil fuels] is no more possible than invading space. It’s not an actual, realizable choice—beyond transitory and costly stunt demonstrations."

"How we live and consume matters just as much as the growing density of our numbers combined with the proliferation of our machines that devour energy on our behalf. (Roads and cell phones all consume energy and materials too.) All three demographic issues are increasing at unsustainable rates and feed each other to propel more economic growth, more emissions and more fragility. The world’s current population is 7.9 billion and grows by 80 million a year. It has slowed down in recent years because the affluent don’t need the energy of children as much as the poor. Even so civilization will add another billion to the planet every dozen years. Redistributing energy wealth (and emissions) from the rich to the poor will not avert disaster if human populations don’t overall decline. Our numbers also reflect a demographic anomaly that began with fossil fuels, a cheap energy source that served as Viagra for the species. Prior to our discovery of fossil fuels, the population of the planet never exceeded one billion. Our excessive numbers are purely a temporary artifact of cheap energy spending and all that it entails — everything from fertilizer to modern medicine."

"In recent decades, support for family planning has waned, and global fertility decline has decelerated as a result. Projections calibrated across the decades of strong family planning support have not acknowledged this change and are consequently underestimating global population growth. Scenarios used to model sustainable futures have used overly optimistic population projections while inferring these outcomes will happen without targeted measures to bring them about. Unless political will is rapidly restored for voluntary family planning programs, the global population will almost certainly exceed 10 billion, rendering sustainable food security and a safe climate unachievable."

"Putting an end to the population explosion will not of itself save the ecosphere, but not ending it will add greatly to the dangers the planet faces. The environment can sustain a quality of life for just so many people."

"In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the . In 1970, the planet's 3 and a half billion people were . But on this New Year's Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live."

"... Homo sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years and we are struggling to provide 7 billion of us with sufficient food, clothing, and shelter to lead decent lives. There cannot be an economist on the planet who thinks Earth could support 7.168 trillion people. Human population growth cannot go on forever, no matter how optimistic economists might be."

"Human overpopulation, the ever-increasing power of our technology, and the demand of our omnicidal, neoliberal economic system of infinite growth on the basis of finite resources threaten the earth with total destruction."

"Ever since Malthus, at least, it has been clear that means of subsistence do not grow as fast as population. No one has ever liked the idea that famine, plague, and war are nature's way of redressing the imbalance -- Malthus himself suggested that the operation of "preventive checks," which serve to reduce the birth rate, might help prolong the interval between such events. And in the two hundred years since Malthus sat down to pen his essay, there has been no worldwide cataclysm. But in the same two centuries world population has grown exponentially while irreplaceable resources were used up. Some kind of adjustment is inevitable. Today, many people who are concerned about overpopulation and environmental degradation believe that human actions can avert catastrophe. The prevailing view holds that a stable population that does not tax the environment's "carrying capacity" would be sustainable indefinitely, and that this state of equilibrium can be achieved through a combination of birth control, conservation, and reliance on "renewable" resources. Unfortunately, worldwide implementation of a rigorous program of birth control is politically impossible. Conservation is futile as long as population continues to rise. And no resources are truly renewable."

"Around 8,000 BC, world population was something like five million. By the time of [the birth of Jesus] Christ, it was 200 to 300 million. By 1650, it was 500 million, and by 1800 it was one billion. The population of the world reached two billion by 1930. By the beginning of the '60s it was three billion; in 1975 it was four billion; and after only eleven more years it was five billion. This cannot go on forever; collapse is inevitable. The only question is when."

"People who believe that a stable population can live in balance with the productive capacity of the environment may see a slowdown in the growth of population and energy consumption as evidence of approaching equilibrium. But when one understands the process that has been responsible for population growth, it becomes clear that an end to growth is the beginning of collapse. Human population has grown exponentially by exhausting limited resources, like yeast in a vat or reindeer on St. Matthew Island, and is destined for a similar fate."

"As human populations expand they necessarily appropriate ecological space required by other species. Human ‘competitive displacement’ of non-human organisms from their habitats and food sources is now the greatest contributing factor to . Consider that with only 0.01 % of total Earthly , H. sapiens’ expansion has eliminated 83 % of wild animal and 50 % of natural plant biomass. From a fraction of 1 % ten millennia ago, humans now constitute 36 %, and our domestic livestock another 60 %, of the planet’s much expanded mammalian biomass compared to only 4 % for all wild species combined. Similarly, domestic poultry now comprise 70 % of Earth’s remaining avian biomass. Meanwhile, commercial fishing depletes the oceans at the expense of rapidly declining marine mammals and birds. Seabirds are the most threatened bird group, with a 70 % community-level population decline between 1950 and 2010."

"Population estimates are usually based on demographic data alone with no consideration of exogenous factors. This is unrealistic. For living organisms, the fact of their own existence ensures that no environment or habitat remains ideal for long. As the subject population expands, it will invariably use up any crucial resource in fixed supply. Even renewable resources can be depleted once the population goes into ‘overshoot’, a situation in which aggregate consumption exceeds food species’ recovery rates or waste accumulation exceeds natural assimilative capacity. The rise and fall of reindeer populations introduced to two previously unoccupied (by reindeer) Pribilof Islands in the early 20th century is a classic example. Collapse was attributed to overgrazed food sources (primarily lichen) abetted by the stress of exceptionally cold winter."

"...for most of our species’ time on Earth—including most of the agricultural era—humanity’s natural propensity to expand has been held in check by negative feedback, e.g., food and other resource shortages, disease, and inter-group conflict. Circumstances changed with the scientific/industrial revolution, particularly the increasingly widespread use of fossil fuels. It took 200,000 – 350,000 years for human numbers to reach one billion early in the 19th Century, but only 200 years (as little as 1/1750th as much time!) to balloon another seven-fold by early in the 21st Century. Improvements in medicine, public sanitation, and population health contributed to this expansion, but coal, oil, and gas made it possible. Fossil fuels are the energetic means by which humans extract, transport, and transform the prodigious quantities of food and other material resources into the products needed to support our burgeoning billions. More than any other factor, fossil fuels enabled H. sapiens to eliminate or reduce normal negative feedbacks. Freed from historic constraints, our species was, at last, able to exhibit its full potential for geometric growth."

"Humanity is already far into ecological overshoot: we are learning the hard way that the ecosphere under stress is still immeasurably more complex than even the global human enterprise. It can generate a vastly larger arsenal of negative feedbacks in response to human excesses than any imaginable human control system can match."

"Humans invade and populate all accessible favourable habitats; human populations use up all available resources; under favourable conditions, human populations are capable of exponential growth. […] The industrial/scientific revolution spawned technologies, particularly improvements in public sanitation and disease control, that greatly reduced death rates while fossil fuels alleviated food and resource shortages. With the suppression of negative factors, positive feedback prevailed; between the early 1800s and 2023, the human population exploded from one to eight billion. Meanwhile, what we now call ‘neoliberal economics’ began taking form in the late 1800s. In just two centuries, the human population grew eight times larger than the maximum attained over the previous 3000 centuries, and the world economy grew 100-fold in real terms! […] Overshoot may be a quasi-natural phenomenon, but it is also a potentially terminal condition. There are now about 80 cities in the world with populations in excess of five million—each has more people than existed on the entire planet at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago. […] Life in higher-income countries just seemed to be getting better and better, at least in material terms. Little wonder that by the 1950s, MTI governments and international institutions everywhere were adopting the neoliberal vision of perpetual economic and population growth via continuous technological advance as the dominant development narrative of global culture. There are, of course, significant problems—all this occurred on a finite, non-growing planet with serious history. With nurture-reinforcing-nature in propelling the expansionist juggernaut, the human enterprise surged into ecological overshoot; resource consumption and waste production are overwhelming the bio-productive and waste assimilation capacities of the ecosphere. This is not merely an aesthetic concern: the functional integrity of the ecosphere is essential for human existence. Overshoot may be a quasi-natural phenomenon, but it is also a potentially terminal condition."

"The current human population is 14,000-fold larger than the average populations of other mammal species of similar body size! […] If humans were a typical mammal whose global population corresponded to the arithmetic mean (average) of populations of mammals of similar body size, there would be only 500,000 people on Earth!"

"Almost all of today’s low-energy countries have a population density so great that it perpetuates dependence on intensive manual agriculture, which alone can yield barely enough food for their people. They do not have enough acreage, per capita, to justify using domestic animals or farm machinery, although better seeds, better soil management, and better hand tools could bring some improvement. A very large part of their working population must nevertheless remain on the land, and this limits the amount of surplus energy that can be produced. Most of these countries must choose between using this small energy surplus to raise their very low standard of living or [to] postpone present rewards for the sake of future gain by investing the surplus in new industries. The choice is difficult because there is no guarantee that today’s denial may not prove to have been in vain. This is so because of the rapidity with which public health measures have reduced mortality rates, resulting in population growth as high [as] or even higher than that of the high-energy nations. Theirs is a bitter choice; it accounts for much of their anti-Western feeling and may well portend a prolonged period of world instability."

"The doubling of life expectancy is largely down to medical advances. Without medical care, we’d probably be at a much lower population level. I can’t find projections, but given that even some fairly routine injuries and sicknesses would be life-threatening without medical intervention, one would expect a more pyramidal pyramid, and 2 billion people doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. This is also amplified by [there] being [fewer] people to innovate ideas like the green revolution, which [led] to higher populations. In nature, population overshoot is usually remedied by a higher die-off rate, not a lower birth rate. But humans think that medical care and increased lifetimes are a sign of progress. Medical advances can even allow some who wouldn’t have been able to have children to have children, thus exacerbating overshoot."

"A lot of technologies have been utilised in storing food or growing more of it. And we know that increased access to food increases population size. The reverse is also true, of course, so we should expect population to fall as harvests come under stress from the effects of climate change."

"Humans are a species, so they are no different in needing to reproduce to propagate their traits, which may eventually lead to what would be considered a new species, though that would likely take tens or hundreds of thousands of years. If our ancestors had considered the effects of what they were doing, why some prey species appeared to disappear, for example, then we wouldn’t be here, as we’d limit what we did, how we expanded, how we spread. Humans would, at best, have remained a very limited species, if it survived at all. But that is not the way life works. Clearly, we have followed the maximum power principle, since we’re a species, and so consume as much energy and resources as we can. In basic terms, a body needs food for energy and humans have figured out how to produce increasing quantities of food (at least in terms of calories) using agriculture, machines, artificial fertilisers and pesticides. This has enabled an explosion in population in a positive feedback loop (with higher population forecast, we figure out how to support that population, leading to more agriculture and higher yields, so we end up with a higher population). The huge success of agriculture and mechanisation, has lead to almost no human being involved in the production of the food that keeps us alive, so we’ve had to invent other ways to kill our time. We now have a huge variety of products and services to help us kill our time before we die. Some of it is pleasurable so we want to do more of it and invent new ways to live. All the time, killing more of the rest of life. But getting here was inevitable because we are a species and don’t have free will to counter those inbuilt drives."

"As food makes babies perhaps the critical development was agriculture but then without fossil fuels, we could never have produced as much food as we do now, and deliver it across the world. But then, if we hadn’t started cooking food, we might not have been clever enough to figure out how to use fossil fuels to produce food. And without language, we could never have communicated complex ideas about agriculture, tool making and the use of fossil fuels. So we go round and round."

"It is often said that humans are in overshoot. What does that mean? In simple terms, it means exceeding a limit. However, if a limit has been exceeded, then how is it a limit? People usually refer to overshoot as exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. The ability for the planet to support the current population of humans. And yet here we are. Humans have apparently been in overshoot territory for a long time, but that hasn’t affected the numbers. Indeed, the population of humans continues to grow."

"We have well over 8 billion people on this planet. All ecosystems have been perturbed, and wildlife has been hugely depleted by over 70% in just the last half century. Deforestation continues apace at almost 5 million hectares per year. So, it’s impossible for all humans to live sustainably right now. If a few chose, and succeeded, to live sustainably, it would have no measurable effect on the planet."

"It is apparently futile only to insist that the more back­ward countries restrict their birth rates. What is needed most of all is economic and technical assistance to these countries. This assistance must be of such scale and generosity that it is unlikely before the estrangement in the world and the egotistical, narrow-minded approach to relations between nations and races are eliminated."

"Government policy, legislation on the family and marriage, and propaganda should not encourage an increase in the birth rates of advanced countries while demanding that it be curtailed in underdeveloped countries that are receiving assistance. Such a two-faced game would produce nothing but bitterness and nationalism."

"I want to emphasize that the question of regulating birth rates is highly complex and that any standardized, dogmatic solution "for all time and all peoples" would be wrong."

"...increasingly, technology has come up against the law of unexpected consequences. Advances in health care have lengthened life spans, lowered infant-mortality rates, and, thus, aggravated the population problem."

"As human beings, with over 8 billion of us on planet Earth at present, we now find ourselves in a very analogous situation to both the early cyanobacteria from over 2 billion years ago and the yeast cells one would culture within a nutrient-rich broth in a petri dish. It isn’t that we’re in danger of transforming our planet into an uninhabitable hellscape, as nothing we’ve done or are in the process of doing is going to have a catastrophic effect of that magnitude. However, there are a number of ways that we’re polluting, destroying, or depleting our environment in ways that not only are non-renewable and unsustainable, but that are going to have negative downstream effects that impact future humans, hundreds and even thousands of years down the line, in ways that most of us aren’t prepared to fully reckon with. And that’s unfortunate, because we should be prepared. After all, unlike yeast, cyanobacteria, or any other species that’s impacted its environment due to its collective, accumulated actions, we can not only detect and quantify the effects we’re having, but can choose to change our action at any time."

"Erroneous belief about population growth has cost dearly. In poor countries, it has directed attention away from the factor that we now know is central in a country's economic development, its economic and political system. And in rich countries, misdirected attention to population growth and its... consequence of natural-resource shortages has caused waste through such programs as now-abandoned synthetic fuel programs, and the useless development of airplanes that would be appropriate for an age of greater scarcity."

"Adding more people causes problems, but people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed our progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination. The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and inevitably they will benefit not only themselves but the rest of us as well."

"Capitalist elites seeking to increase the size of their labour force used pro-natalist state policies to prevent women from practicing family planning. [...] We should not ignore the relationship between population growth and ecology, but we must not treat these as operating in a social and political vacuum."

"History upon Terra tells us what horrors follow upon religious mandates of unlimited reproduction."

"Malthusian predictions that relentless population growth will outstrip food production and trigger starvation worldwide have recurred over the centuries. They have come and then gone as farmers have deployed new technologies to increase food output. Even now, enough food is being produced to adequately feed every person on the planet; the fact that nearly one billion people are nonetheless going hungry is a damning indictment of the world's food-distribution system. But since demand is growing, production will also have to increase in the years ahead. With the world's population expected to expand to more than nine billion by 2050 and much of that growth occurring in China, India, and other countries where living standards are rising fast, global food production will need to increase by 70-100 percent in order to keep pace and feed the already chronically hungry. This is a mighty challenge: all the more so because given current soil technology and environmental concerns, more food will have to be produced on roughly the same amount of arable land -- and with less water than is used now and at a time when both growing demand for biofuels and changing climate patterns are also putting pressure on production. Where will the needed rise in food supplies come from, and how quickly can the distribution problems be solved?"

"Given the Maoist position that a large population was a “resource”, rather than a burden, for the Communist state, it was politically incorrect to advocate population control [either by diet or medicine]."

"Supporting large families and unchecked growth (of which the greatest parameter is population increase) is a mantra which religion and authority have preached for thousands of years. Religions always need more clergy to reap donations from, and leaders more voters to turn into soldiers for their next war, or to make the gross (as opposed to per capita) GDP figures look good. We are being farmed, we have always been farmed for thousands of years by an economic system that prioritises cold hard profit figures over real prosperity. Competition fuels growth even more, as humans are extremely territorial. The problem with the existence of countries is that they speed up civilisational collapse. They all end up competing for economic and population growth, therefore significantly accelerating civilisational overshoot and collapse."

"Thanks to the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, humans (really just a small minority of them) are able to live richer lives today than even the queens and kings of yore could have dreamed of. Furthermore, we’ve used some of those finite resources to increase food supplies and to expand the human population, which provides the economic system with both more workers and more consumers, a necessity to keep the economy growing under our current economic model. The world’s population increased from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7 billion today, and we add about 80 million more each year. Humans have quickly become the most numerous megafauna on the planet."

"Humans, because of their intelligence, have found ways to [temporarily] defeat survival of the fittest. As areas get overpopulated, humans have moved to areas where they have a better chance of survival. Humans have found ways to increase food supply, through the use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and refrigeration, all of which require fossil fuels. They have developed trade, so that so areas with shortfalls can benefit from surpluses elsewhere. Humans have developed a world financial system, which has helped enable worldwide trade. The financial system has also allowed investors to pay for goods after they are put into service, so that the cash flow resulting from an investment can be used (after the fact) to pay for the cost of the investment. This enables investment, and faster use of resources, including energy resources. One of the reasons for continued upward population pressure is the fact that humans have evolved to live beyond their reproductive years. In their declining years, humans often need assistance, either from their offspring or from a public pension program, or both. Because of concern for their own old age, people without pensions tend to have enough children so that there is a significant chance that a child of the right sex will survive to adulthood. With improving medical care, this tends to lead to [an] ever-rising population."

"As long as the world’s population is rising, even in lesser developed countries, there is going to be a continuing need for more food, clothing and housing. This is an issue we don’t seem to be able even to talk about. It may offend people."

"The energy resource that we learned to develop this time is fossil fuels, starting with coal about 1800. World population was able to expand greatly because of additional food production permitted by fossil fuels and because of improvements in hygiene. A period of stagflation began in the 1970s, when we first encountered problems with US oil production and spiking oil prices. Now, the question is whether we are approaching the Crisis Stage as described by Turchin and Nefedov."

"As energy supplies deplete, we will increasingly need to “choose our battles.” In the past, humans have been able to win many battles against nature. However, as energy per capita declines in the future, we will be able to win fewer and fewer of these battles against nature, such as our current battle with COVID-19. At some point, we may simply need to let the chips fall where they may. The world economy seems unable to accommodate 7.8 billion people, and we will have no choice but to face this issue."

"Many people believe that humans can have a sustainable future by using solar panels and wind turbines. Unfortunately, the only truly sustainable course, in terms of moving in cycles with nature, is interacting with the environment in a manner similar to the approach used by chimpanzees and baboons. Even this approach will eventually lead to new and different species predominating. Over a long period, such as 10 million years, we can expect the vast majority of species currently alive will become extinct, regardless of how well these species fit in with nature’s plan. The key to the relative success of animals such as chimpanzees and baboons is living within a truly circular economy. Sunlight falling on trees provides the food they need. Waste products of their economy come back to the forest ecosystem as fertilizer. Pre-humans lost the circular economy when they learned to control fire over one million years ago, when they were still hunter-gatherers. With the controlled use of fire, cooked food became possible, making it easier to chew and digest food. The human body adapted to the use of cooked food by reducing the size of the jaw and digestive tract and increasing the size of the brain. This adaptation made pre-humans truly different from other animals. With the use of fire, pre-humans had many powers. They spent less time chewing, so they could spend more time making tools. They could burn down entire forests, if they so chose, to provide a better environment for the desired types of wild plants to grow. They could use the heat from fire to move to colder environments than the one to which they were originally adapted, thus allowing a greater total population. Once pre-humans could outcompete other species, the big problem became diminishing returns. For example, once the largest beasts were killed off, only smaller beasts were available to eat. The amount of effort required to kill these smaller beasts was not proportionately less, however."

"… the problem the world is facing today is like one that smaller economies have faced, over and over, in the past: The population has become too large for the economy’s resource base, which now includes fossil fuels. Today’s leaders reframe the problem as voluntarily moving away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change in order to make the situation sound less frightening."

"We are dealing with an age-old problem: Humans are able to outsmart other animals, and for this reason, human populations tend to rise except when external conditions are quite adverse."

"History shows a repeated pattern of overshoot and collapse. A population would grow until the carrying capacity of the local area was reached. Food surpluses would become lower and lower, so less food could be saved up for fluctuations in rainfall and temperature. Eventually, civilizations would succumb to one or another problem: disease, attack by a neighboring group, climate fluctuations, or governments overthrown by unhappy citizens. We tell ourselves that overshoot and collapse cannot happen now, but human population is high relative to fossil fuel resources, and intermittent wind and solar are not working out well as substitutes."

"Humans are smarter than other animals, allowing the population of humans to grow, while the population of many other species tends to fall. […] The large rise in the population of the less advanced economies contributes to the huge number of immigrants wanting new homes in higher-income countries. […] The issue is that available resources do not rise fast enough (in the area, or with the technology available) to provide enough physical goods and services for the population. If a new approach can be developed, or a neighboring area with additional resources can be conquered, [the] population can start to grow again. […] Outgrowing our resource base is not a phenomenon that began with fossil fuels. […] In 1796, when [the] world population was about one billion, Robert Thomas Malthus wrote about population growing faster than food production. This was before fossil fuels were widely used. Now, about 230 years later, [the] population has risen to eight billion, thanks to the availability of fossil fuels. We need major innovations, or additional energy resource types, if we want to work around obstacles now."

"The hard fact is that in an age of climate breakdown, human numbers matter. And the ecological impact of another 2-3 billion humans will be immense."

"We must look at the whole man, and at his whole environment. Above all, we must realize that every grain of rice he puts into his mouth, every bit of potato, every piece of meat, and every kernel of corn, must be replaced by another bit from the earth—somewhere. We must realize that not only does every area have a limited carrying capacity—but also that this carrying capacity is shrinking and the demand growing. Until this understanding becomes an intrinsic part of our thinking and wields a powerful influence on our formation of national and international policies we are scarcely likely to see in what direction our destiny lies."

"[There's] too many people making too much muck and too much noise with too little space to do it in."

"Today, escalating human populations have vastly exceeded global carrying capacity and now produce massive quantities of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste. Biological diversity is being threatened by over-exploitation, toxic pollution, agricultural mono-culture, invasive species, competition, habitat destruction, urban sprawl, oceanic acidification, ozone depletion, global warming, and climate change. It’s a runaway train of ecological calamities."

"Homo sapiens’ appetite is gargantuan. As we strive to get at dwindling resources for ever more people, we dig deeper into the Earth, blow the tops of mountains, divert rivers, cut down forests and pave over swaths of land. We fill the land, water, and air with our pollution. We’re driving record numbers of species to extinction and decimating others with activities from chemical poisoning to hunting for bushmeat, or simply by taking over their habitat. Greenhouse gases from our industry are changing the Earth’s climate, with such dangerous consequences as ocean acidification, rising sea levels and flooding, changes in rainfall patterns including in vital “breadbaskets,” and loss of forest cover. While the word “sustainable” has become popular, growing human numbers and activities are anything but. Increasing awareness of our impact has led to developments in renewable energy, recycling, earth-friendly farming and more. There have also been spectacular advances in family planning. But powerful—notably religious—opposition has kept governments and international bodies from actively promoting small families and prevented hundreds of millions of women who would plan their families from having access to modern methods. Those who deny that overpopulation is a problem say the poor don’t consume much. Yet the poor want nothing more than to consume more, as proved by India and China. Who can blame them? And a burgeoning number of desperately poor people does have a major impact: they cut down forests to grow food, drain rivers, deplete aquifers, and overfish and over-hunt in their local area. But make these points and you’ll be accused of blaming the poor for the problems of the rich. We seem bound to learn the hard way that there really is a limit to how many people the Earth can support. We wish it weren’t so, but it really is starting to look as if Malthus was right."

"...the gains of low infant and maternal mortality and rises in population longevity—brought about in great part by harnessing fossil fuels, the agricultural revolution, modernization, and disease and injury reduction efforts—in many instances impedes rather than facilitates moving toward sustainable living. It can be argued from the ecological perspective that most public health efforts, as humanitarian as they are by intention and immediate effect, through accelerating population pressures on the environment are paradoxically hastening the destruction of the earth's habitat on which the next generation of humanity depends. It raises the concern that our perceived gains may be only illusory and temporary, with huge but unmeasured and unlinked environmental costs that will eventually lead to shorter lives of misery for our descendants."

"In the past, when one civilization collapsed, others evolved to replace it. Today the world-wide agroindustrial complex is making unprecedented demands on the whole earth’s biological ecostructure. After a brief half-century in which factory farming enlarged the meagre diet of the poor (though not for all, nor always to their benefit), the multinational food industry has become a primary impetus towards overpopulation, obesity, pollution, and global warming. Policies and practices whose effects were once circumscribed are now a threat to human survival."

"Agriculture, by overcoming the limitations inherent in the closed system of hunting/gathering, made possible the open-ended expansion of both the population and the means of feeding it. Once it had been adopted, there was no turning back. The more that a civilization farmed, the more it needed extra hands, and so large families were deliberately procreated, which in turn produced still more mouths to feed. Colin Tudge calls it a vicious spiral, Ronald Wright a progress trap."

"Nature’s modus operandi is to kill off the weakest, leaving only the strongest and most biologically versatile to reproduce. But for homo sapiens, nature is not a force to be accommodated, but an opponent to be grappled with, and so ‘farming for money’ was joined by ‘medicine for money’. On top of the lucrative agroindustry which accellerates the population explosion, we have set up an equally profitable ‘health’ industry whose job it is to keep alive those whose bodies rebel at what they are so unhealthily force-fed. The result is an expanding segment of the population who, along with accellerating obesity, suffer from various diseases of malnutrition, together with allergies and intolerances to a growing list of foodstuffs that are increasingly difficult to avoid. In the end, humanity may consist of a remnant of survivors who spend their brief unhappy lives closeted against the encroaching poisons which their ancestors had so profitably created. Instant death by peanut may prove to have been a warning blip on the radar screen."

"Today the threat lies in the sheer scale of our greed and our technological ineptitude. We’re driving entire countries over cliffs. We are destroying the delicate ecological balance which a [sic] brief interlude of stable climate has allowed us. We make pious noises about the disappearing terrestrial species while largely ignoring the invisible havoc we’re bringing about in the earth’s oceans, the source and sustenance of life on the land."

"The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology or land-use management is sophistic. If Bangladesh had 10 million inhabitants instead of 115 million [as of this writing], its impoverished people could live on prosperous farms away from the dangerous floodplains midst a natural and stable upland environment. It is also sophistic to point to the Netherlands and Japan, as many commentators incredibly still do, as models of densely populated but prosperous societies. Both are highly specialized industrial nations dependent on massive imports of natural resources from the rest of the world. If all nations held the same number of people per square kilometer, they would converge in quality of life to Bangladesh rather than to the Netherlands and Japan, and their irreplaceable natural resources would soon join the seven wonders of the world as scattered vestiges of an ancient [sic] history."

"The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that had ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another one hundred years like that."

"If we fail to limit our numbers and our impact, if we do not replace our goldrush economics with a rational sharing of what the earth can yield, this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all dark ages in our past."

"So among the things we need to know about ourselves is that the Upper Palaeolithic period, which may well have begun in genocide, ended with an all-you-can-kill wildlife barbecue. The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts."

"What determines population growth? What has been the cause of the unprecedented growth in world population in our recent history? Many socio-economic reasons are given as explanations: medical advances, improvements in public health, sanitation and hygiene, increased food availability and agricultural productivity, extension of cultivation, and development of trade and transportation. Surprisingly, high quality energy sources are rarely mentioned or quickly discounted. Yet an argument can be made that each of the above factors contributing to population growth is aided and influenced by high quality energy supplies. Cheap and abundant fossil fuels have been a necessary precondition for the past century’s population growth. And while not all countries benefit directly from the consumption of high quality energy supplies, most countries benefit from the impact of high energy societies on low energy societies. What if energy consumption, or more precisely, energy resource availability, somehow determines population growth? Perhaps energy resources determine the Earth’s carrying capacity, or how many people the Earth can support? Perhaps different energy resources have different effects on population growth? If we hypothesize that the Earth’s population is ultimately determined by availability of energy resources, and if some of those energy resources are at or near their peak rates of production, then that may affect rates of population growth. If the correlation is strong enough, the number of people the Earth can support may also be at or near its peak. Therefore the number of people in 2050 may be very different from widespread United Nations (UN) forecasts. Growing populations consume more energy. Availability of energy allows populations to grow. Energy consumption exerts demands on energy resources making them scarcer. They become harder to extract. Nearby forests are depleted, coal mines must dig deeper, oil has to be drilled in more complex environments. In other words, energy resource extraction experiences declining marginal returns. This has led to the exploitation of new energy sources, which in turn expands the Earth’s carrying capacity. Then populations grow once more."

"Mature populations tend to reach equilibrium – the carrying capacity – and then fluctuate around this equilibrium. If a population outgrows its carrying capacity, regulating factors come into play, such as famine, or emigration. If a population is below its carrying capacity, birth rates tend to increase, so the population grows. The common assumption is that carrying capacity is determined by the availability of food, water and land. While availability of food and water are important factors in determining the carrying capacity of populations, they cannot explain the unprecedented increases in population that have occurred in the last several hundred years. The availability of land has always been a factor in increasing carrying capacity. In the historic past, the Earth’s carrying capacity could be increased by expanding into sparsely occupied, or frontier, lands. In a fictitious future, carrying capacity could be increased by expanding outward to other planets or solar systems. At present, there is very little unoccupied, habitable land remaining on this Earth and no nearby habitable planets to release the pressure of population growth, so any increase in carrying capacity must be a result of other factors."

"At present the world’s population is growing rapidly. The planet could not support the six billion plus people that exist today without first the commercialisation of coal, then of oil and, more recently, gas. These energy sources have been necessary for the unprecedented population growth that has occurred over the last three hundred years. It is reasonable to assume that unless current energy resource production is increased and new resources are exploited, the population will no longer grow. And if energy resources decline (e.g. a peak in production is reached), then we may see a decline in population."

"Roughly 10,000 years ago, increasing population pressure on wild food resources led to a shift from food gathering (hunter-gatherers) to food production (agriculturists) in several parts of the world. This led to demand-induced technologies and demand-induced searches for higher quality energy sources, such as water power for flow irrigation, animal draft power, iron tools, and fire for land clearing and for improvement of hunting and pastoralism. Population pressures in many parts of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to serious shortages of wood which in turn led to many of the technological innovations that fuelled the Industrial Revolution. Coal’s replacement of wood as the most important source of energy in Western Europe is a classic example of demand-induced innovation…promoted by population pressures on forested land in Western and Central Europe. From the end of World War II, coal’s premier importance as an energy source declined sharply and was replaced by crude oil. Far offshore drilling of oil began in 1947 off the coast of Louisiana. One year later, the world’s largest oil field, al-Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, was drilled. Large new discoveries of oil and gas in Africa and Asia combined with the development of oil super tankers and pipeline networks reduced the price of oil and gas at a time when the costs of producing coal were continuing to rise. Diesel locomotives represented a major substitution of oil for coal. The post World War II era also saw large increases in automobile ownership, the beginnings of highway and motorway road transportation networks and the first passenger jet aircraft –all benefiting from and encouraging consumption of cheap oil supplies. These increases in the consumption of crude oil have coincided with the highest population growth in history. After the depressed population growth during World War II, growth rose quickly to a peak of 2.2% in 1964, the highest rate the world has ever known. (Per capita oil consumption peaked shortly thereafter, in the 1970s). Although population continues to rise, population growth has been declining since then. If there is a relationship between energy consumption and population growth, the different types of energy consumed may have different effects. If biomass is the only energy source, populations will not grow very fast. In such organically based economies, the problem of expanding raw material supply, and especially the related problems associated with the very modest energy supply maxima…must curb growth with increasing severity as expansion takes place. The emergence of coal as an energy source eliminated the carrying capacity limits to population growth that any traditional and biomass energy based culture would eventually face. Similarly, the predominance of oil after the middle part of the twentieth century raised the carrying capacity even further."

"According to the IEA [International Energy Agency], 1.6 billion people live without electricity. Much of Africa and Asia still rely on biomass as their primary source of energy, yet have very high population growth rates. How can there be a correlation between energy and population in these instances? While many developing world countries remain low energy societies, they, and their population growth rates, are impacted by high energy societies. Their primary energy sources may still be traditional biomass, but their population growth is due in large part to abundant oil and gas supplies. Vaccines and antibiotics that reduce third world mortality are discovered, produced and distributed with first world energy, and oil contributes at every step. Fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides that aided the Green Revolution in much of the developing world could not have been produced without large oil and gas inputs. The aeroplanes, boats and trains that deliver and distribute food all run on oil. While the commercialisation of higher quality energy sources may be very unevenly distributed, the societies that adopt new energy sources, high energy societies, have a profound impact on those societies that remain low energy societies, and these impacted populations then become part of Coal, Oil or Natural Gas Populations."

"Just 11,000 years ago, there were only roughly 5 million humans who lived on the planet Earth. The initial population growth was slow, due largely to the way humans were living—by hunting. Such lifestyle limited the size of family for practical reasons. A woman on the move cannot carry more than one infant along with her household baggage. When simple birth control means-often abstention from sex failed, a woman may elect abortion or, more commonly, infanticide to limit the family size. Further, a high mortality among the very young, the old, the ill and the disabled acted as a natural resistance to a rapid population growth. Thus it took over one million years for human population to reach the one billion mark. But the second billion was added in about 100 years, the third billion in 50 years, the fourth in 15 years, and the fifth in 12 years. Ever since humans became sedentary, some limits over the family size were lifted. With the development of agriculture, children may have become more of an asset to their families in helping with farming and other chores. By the beginning of the Christian era, human population grew to about 130 million, distributed all over the Earth. By 1650, the world population had reached 500 million. The process of industrialization had begun, bringing about profound changes over the lives of humans and their interactions with the natural world. With improved living standard, lowered death rate and prolonged life expectancy, human population grew exponentially. By 1999 there were about 6 billion people, comparing with 2.5 billion in 1950. The world population is well on its way to 7 billion with an annual growth rate of over 90 million."

"In the wake of teachers’ strikes in a number of states, recent polling shows public support for unions at 64 percent—the highest, except for a few blips, in half a century. These are important developments. Labor is finally stirring. And Americans are on to the fact that Trump’s faux populism is actually all about rigging the game in favor of the wealthy."

"[T]he Nazi years had already accustomed Germans to an all-encompassing labor organization through the Labor Front, which had enjoyed considerable appeal among workers, not least because of its insistence on broad inclusiveness and equality between 'workers of the hand and the mind'."

"Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun."

"To speak for labor; to plead the cause of the men and women and children who toil; to serve the working class, has always been to me a high privilege; a duty of love."

"Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. I have no use for those -- regardless of their political party -- who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice."

"American labor was strongest when the threat of communism was greatest. The apogee of America's welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War. The dismantling of the welfare state and the labor movement, meanwhile, marched in tandem with communism's collapse."

"The Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers (AFT), the sec­ond largest teach­ers’ union in the coun­try, passed a res­o­lu­tion in sup­port of the Green New Deal at its bien­ni­al con­ven­tion at the end of July. The Green New Deal, fed­er­al leg­is­la­tion intro­duced in ear­ly 2019, would cre­ate a liv­ing-wage job for any­one who wants one and imple­ment 100% clean and renew­able ener­gy by 2030. The endorse­ment is huge news for both Green New Deal advo­cates and the AFL-CIO, the largest fed­er­a­tion of unions in the Unit­ed States. The AFT’s endorse­ment could be a sign of envi­ron­men­tal activists’ grow­ing pow­er, and it sends a mes­sage to the AFL-CIO that it, too, has an oppor­tu­ni­ty to get on board with the Green New Deal.... The Green New Deal’s focus on invest­ing in high-speed rail could mean sig­nif­i­cant poten­tial work for elec­tri­cians and rail work­ers like Lib­er­a­to. The leg­is­la­tion also calls for ​“repair­ing and upgrad­ing the infra­struc­ture in the Unit­ed States,” which means fix­ing bridges and roads, retro­fitting build­ings, and updat­ing sewage and water sys­tems. And the AFT’s green school build­ings cam­paign will need the sup­port of build­ing trades unions, like elec­tri­cians, plumbers, roofers, and boil­er­mak­ers. All of this infra­struc­ture work means more union jobs — but only if the labor move­ment acknowl­edges the true mag­ni­tude of cli­mate change and decides to play a lead­er­ship role in fight­ing it."

"Labor’s cur­rent focus is get­ting Joe Biden elect­ed... He promis­es to ​“ful­fill our oblig­a­tion to work­ers… who pow­ered our indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion and decades of eco­nom­ic growth” by secur­ing coal min­ers’ pen­sions and ben­e­fits. And he also promis­es to ​“put peo­ple to work by enlist­ing them to help fight the pan­dem­ic, includ­ing through a Pub­lic Health Jobs Corps.” But unlike the Green New Deal leg­is­la­tion, his plat­form has no explic­it promise of a job for all who want one... ​“What we need to do is pres­sure Biden into a Jobs for All pro­gram, and the green is not in the head­line, but it’s incor­po­rat­ed into it. The envi­ron­men­tal­ists will read the fine print, and maybe labor can look at it and say, this is what we need.”"

"History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them"

"The organized workers of America, free in their industrial life, conscious partners in production, secure in their homes and enjoying a decent standard of living, will prove the finest bulwark against the intrusion of alien doctrines of government."

"Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion energy plan Tuesday with a heavy focus on the Green New Deal agenda... Speaking in Wilmington, Del., Biden promised a “clean energy revolution,” which he said would deliver millions of jobs... Biden detailed what he called a pro-union platform that would replace the US government’s car fleet with American-made electric vehicles... The former veep on Tuesday promised to “create millions of high-paying union jobs by building a modern infrastructure and a clean energy future” and described his vision of a US covered in 500,000 electric car charging stations and thriving factories producing green products."

"The quality of his being one with his people, of having no artificial or natural barriers between him and them, made it possible for him to be a leader without ever being or thinking of being a dictator."

"The labor movement has long been struggling in the U.S., as fewer workers join unions and as high-profile organizing drives, like a June attempt to unionize Volkswagen employees in Tennessee, fall short. But American workers, feeling left behind as the economy grows around them, are joining together to demand a bigger slice of the pie. On Sept. 16, 50,000 workers walked off the job in their first strike since 2007, protesting idled plants and low wages. Nearly 8,000 Marriott workers went on strike in eight cities last year, while 31,000 supermarket employees in the Northeast did the same in early 2019. In the past year, tens of thousands of teachers walked out of their classrooms to demand better pay and funding. In all, nearly half a million workers participated in strikes and work stoppages last year, the most since 1986. The labor disruptions show no sign of abating. [...] The recent labor unrest is in part fueled by uneven . While companies are prospering and the stock market hovers near all-time highs, the benefits haven’t been felt by many workers, who are often stuck in temporary jobs with no benefits. Paradoxically, the strong economy also emboldens workers. [...] When more jobs are available and unemployment is low, people feel more confident in demanding better pay and benefits. [...] Many nonunion workers also want change. Those in the , many of whom are considered- s and thus not eligible to unionize or receive benefits, have been demanding higher pay and steadier hours."

"Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground."

"The most important word in the language of the working class is solidarity."

"As ambassadors of Jesus Christ, Christians have no choice but to join the movement of liberation on the side of the poor, fighting against the structures of injustice. Faith in Jesus Christ, therefore, is not only an affirmation that we utter in Sunday worship and at other church gatherings. Faith is a commitment, a deeply felt experience of being called by the Spirit of Christ to bear witness to God's coming liberation by fighting for the freedom of the poor now."

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security."

"This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality.... Solidarity which comes from likenesses is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it.... when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life."

"Courage calls to courage everywhere."

"Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations."

"Solidarity always operates in tension with logics of domination."

"Thus, a group's solidarity is a function of two independent factors: first, the extensiveness of its corporate obligations, and, second, the degree to which individual members actually comply with these obligations. Together, these provide the defining elements of solidarity. The greater the average proportion of each member's private resources contributed to collective ends, the greater the solidarity of the group."

"“Does it make you a king"

"how does any sane person react after a while to fear, guilt? Is this a way to build a movement?...Only recognition of a common goal, the possibilities and I want to say-the joys of solidarity will inspire women who don't feel guilty to join another struggle as their own...Solidarity requires the bonding together of a people engaged in common struggle. But solidarity also means standing alongside another struggle, not because you feel guilty but because you recognize it as your own; it means using what you have on behalf of the struggle."

"The public service is a principle of social solidarity."

"A politics of solidarity demands that my ally’s needs are my own."

"Solidarity is not an act of charity but an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives."

"Karl Heinzen ... transforms the distinction between classes into the “distinction between the size of purses” and class contradictions into “craft-bickering”. The size of one’s purse is a purely quantitative distinction whereby any two individuals of the same class may be incited against one another at will."

"Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable."

"Because I am of the people, I understand the people, I am sorrowful with their sorrow, I am hungry with their desire; My heart is heavy with the grief of mothers, My eyes have been wet with the tears of children."

"Jesus’ “mysterious” affection for the sinners, which is closely related to his ever-ready militancy against the scribes and pharisees, against every kind of social respectability ... contains a kind of awareness that the great transformation of life, the radical change in outlook he demands of man (in Christian parlance it is called “rebirth”) is more accessible to the sinner than to the “just.” ... When the noblest men are in the company of the “good”—even of the truly “good,” not only of the pharisees—they are often overcome by a sudden impetuous yearning to go to the sinners, to suffer and struggle at their side and to share their grievous, gloomy lives. This is truly no temptation by the pleasures of sin, nor a demoniacal love for its “sweetness,” nor the attraction of the forbidden or the lure of novel experiences. It is an outburst of tempestuous love and tempestuous compassion for all men who are felt as one, indeed for the universe as a whole; a love which makes it seem frightful that only some should be “good,” while the others are “bad” and reprobate. In such moments, love and a deep sense of solidarity are repelled by the thought that we alone should be “good,” together with some others. This fills us with a kind of loathing for those who can accept this privilege, and we have an urge to move away from them."

"Speak out on behalf of the voiceless, and for the rights of all who are vulnerable."

"We always have hoped that American diplomacy deploys itself in dialogue and persuasion rather than by ultimatums. That is the path we want in international relations."

"Even if you persuade me, you won’t persuade me."

"Variant:You won't persuade [peiseis] me even if you convince [peisēs] me."

"In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech."

"This progress among the people through Dharma has been done by two means, by Dharma regulations and by persuasion. Of these, Dharma regulation is of little effect, while persuasion has much more effect. The Dharma regulations I have given are that various animals must be protected. And I have given many other Dharma regulations also. But it is by persuasion that progress among the people through Dharma has had a greater effect in respect of harmlessness to living beings and non-killing of living beings."

"Persuasion of others is to show that oneself is convinced."

"If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated."

"To yield readily--easily--to the persuasion of a friend is no merit.... To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.”"

"Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world."

"Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art."

"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor. I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

"Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world."

"What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views."

"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process."

"There is hardly an example of a mass movement achieving vast proportions and a durable organization solely by persuasion. ...It was the temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion. Conquest and conversion went hand in hand... Where Christianity failed to gain or retain the backing of state power, it achieved neither a wide nor a permanent hold. ..."The most flourishing periods for Mohammedanism have been at the times of its greatest political ascendency..." The Reformation made headway only when it gained the backing of the ruling prince or the local government. In the case of the French Revolution, "It was the armies of the Revolution, not its ideas, that penetrated throughout the whole of Europe." ...The threat of communism at present does not come from the forcefulness of its preaching but from the fact that it is backed by one of the mightiest armies on earth."

"I used all diligence to arrive at London and therefore I now gave my crew a certificate under my hand, of my free and willing return, without persuasion or force by any one or more of them."

"Maybe tomorrow when He looks down Every green field and every town All of his children, every nation There'll be peace and good, brotherhood… Crystal blue persuasion."

"Behold, I am become a reproach to thy holy name, by serving any ambition and the sins of others; which though I did by the persuasion of other men, yet my own conscience did cheek and upbraid me in it."

"It is therefore worthwhile, to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things, whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent, and moderate our persuasions."

"The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion."

"It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar."

"American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that."

"A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion."

"I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life."

"The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society."

"Only by plunging into illusions to which every fact gives the lie can he persuade himself that his will is a force that can overcome all other forces, or that it is less conditioned by circumstances than a wheelbarrow is."

"I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion."

"Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion."

"They have the knack of persuading men before instructing them; although truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by first persuading."

"The problem with breaking up with someone, if you are a little unsure — and so often, people are unsure — is that breaking up involves persuasion. You have to persuade your ex that it is better this way for everyone. And this is difficult if you have not entirely persuaded yourself. It is especially tricky to do this if you are also naked, and making two cups of coffee.”"

"Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces."

"'Tis more than reason that goes to persuasion."

"There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

"When questions of “class” interests are eliminated from public controversy a victory is thereby gained for the possessing, conservative class, whose only hope of security lies in such elimination."

"The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally."

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

"Just as class inequality leads to class struggle within societies, such international inequality leads to struggle between them. If the content of class struggles is the distribution of surplus, income and control over social production, that of international struggle is the international division of labour and the position of various nations in its hierarchy. The more advanced capitalist nations seek to maintain and extend the uneven distribution of productivity and productive power, and the resulting control over the sources of surplus profit, that privilege them and permit them to impose the costs of their capitalism's contradictions on other societies."

"We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy. We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40, 50 per cent."

"Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown. The corporate have now seized all institutional systems of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, along with nearly all forms of communication, are in corporate hands. Our democracy, with faux debates between two corporate parties, is meaningless political theater. There is no way within the system to defy the demands of , the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is revolt."

"The class warfare is global. Not until workers in sweatshops in China, Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh are lifted out of poverty will the American working class be lifted out of poverty. This class war is the real fight, which corporate-owned media platforms and bankrupt liberals refuse to discuss."

"Unions break down political divides, bringing workers of all political persuasions together to fight a common oligarchic and corporate foe. Once workers begin to exert power and extract demands from the ruling class, the struggle educates communities about the real configurations of power and mitigates the feelings of powerlessness that have driven many into the arms of the neofascists."

"All the openings in our democracy were the result of prolonged popular struggle. Hundreds of workers were murdered, thousands were wounded, tens of thousands were blacklisted in our labor wars, the bloodiest of any industrialized country. Abolitionists, suffragists, unionists, crusading journalists and those in the anti-war and civil rights movements opened our democratic space. These radical movements were repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the early 20th century in the name of anti-communism. They were again targeted by the corporate elites following the rise of new mass movements in the 1930s. These popular movements, which rose again in the 1960s, moved us, inch by bloody inch, towards equality and social justice. Most of these gains made in the 1960s have been rolled back under the onslaught of neoliberalism, deregulation, and a corrupt campaign finance system, legalized by court rulings such as Citizens United, which allow the rich and corporations to bankroll elections to select political leaders and impose legislation. The modern incarnation of 19th-century robber barons, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each worth some $200 billion, summon us to our radical roots."

"We cannot dismiss and demonize rural white Americans. The class war waged by corporations and the ruling oligarchs has devastated their lives and communities. They have been betrayed. They have every right to be angry. That anger can sometimes be expressed in inappropriate ways, but they are not the enemy. They too are victims. In my case, they are family. I come from here. Our fight for economic justice must include them. We will wrest back control of our nation together or not at all."

"Class struggle is inextricably bound to the struggle to end racism."

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth."

"Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against their class enemy. The aura of magic, glamour, luster and splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective layer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shield and conceal the dilapidation of the old bourgeois reign of terror."

"Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe?"

"Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor."

"Empire has manufactured a discontinuity in popular struggle, while maintaining continuity in its own growth and consolidation. One of the empire’s principal tools and weapons has been its prisons."

"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you."

"To paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk, the first rule of American class warfare is this: It is always waged upward, never downward. That's because it's an all-purpose rhetorical cudgel favored among conservatives any time public debate threatens to oscillate outside the approved range of questions such as "Tax Cuts: Super Awesome, or Merely Awesome?""

"The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes."

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening."

"This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world."

"The revolution of the proletariat - the war of the poor against the rich, is the only way from oppression to deliverance."

"Anything that can tear up the side of a mountain should definitely be effective against a high society party attended by royalty or capitalist exploiters (monopolists)."

"War is a class conflict, too. The rich and powerful who open war escape the consequences of their decisions. It’s not their children sent into the jaws of violence. It is often the vulnerable, the poor, & working people -who had little to no say in conflict - who pay the price."

"Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all."

"It is real-life class struggle, informed no doubt by ideas, that ultimately determines which way the world will move."

"Once class struggle, for changing the system in its present form, acquires momentum, its outcome would depend on praxis and may not necessarily remain bounded within the system itself."

"Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural, especially its blood, superiority. Under conditions of stable distribution of power and, consequently, of status order, that myth is accepted by the negatively privileged strata. Such a situation exists as long as the masses continue in that natural state of theirs in which thought about the order of domination remains but little developed, which means, as long as no urgent needs render the state of affairs “problematical.” But in times in which the class situation has become unambiguously and openly visible to everyone as the factor determining every man’s individual fate, that very myth of the highly privileged about everyone having deserved his particular lot has often become one of the most passionately hated objects of attack."

"Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why."

"The state's fear of its citizenry is rooted in a deeper knowledge of systemic fissures in our country; fissures produced by the disgraceful treatment of an — including women, children, dissenters, religious minorities, labour, prisoners, and more — often by state institutions themselves."

"The so-called minorities are majorities but since less is more the more should feel that they are less... Less is more is a fabrication of the rich to make the poor think that by having less goodies they can have more babies. But less food for those babies. That is what they mean when they say less is more. Less for you and more for me."

"Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely."

"It is impossible that bodies of men should always be brought to think alike: there is often a degree of coercion, and the majority is governed by the minority, and vice versa, according to the strength of opinions, tempers, prejudices, and even interests."

"'Two peoples never meet,' the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits once wrote, 'but they mingle their blood.' Mingling, however, is only one of a range of options when two diverse human populations meet. The minority group may remain distinct for breeding purposes but become integrated into the majority group in all or some other respects (language, religious belief, dress, lifestyle). Alternatively, interbreeding can go on, at least for a time, but one or both of the two groups may nevertheless preserve or even adopt distinct cultural or ethnic identities. Here is an important distinction. Whereas 'race' is a matter of inherited physical characteristics, transmitted from parents to children in DNA, 'ethnicity' is a combination of language, custom and ritual, inculcated in the home, the school and the temple. It is perfectly possible for a genetically intermixed population to split into two or more biologically indistinguishable but culturally differentiated ethnic groups. The process may be voluntary, but it may also be based on coercion - notably where major changes of religious belief are concerned. One or both groups may even opt for residential and other forms of segregation; the majority may insist that the minority lives in a clearly delineated space, or the minority may choose to do so for its own reasons. The two groups may cordially ignore one another, or there may be friction, perhaps leading to civil strife or one-sided massacres. The groups may fight one another or one group may submit to expulsion by the other. Genocide is the extreme case, in which one group attempts to annihilate the other."

"Why, if minorities face such risks by not assimilating, do ethnic identities persist, even in cases where no biological distinction exists? There are, to be sure, fewer ethnic groups in the world today than there were a century ago; witness the decline in the number of living languages. Yet despite the best efforts of the global market and the nation state to impose cultural uniformity, many minority cultures have proved remarkably resilient. Indeed, persecution has sometimes tended to strengthen the self-consciousness of the persecuted. Passing on an inherited culture may simply be gratifying in its own right; we enjoy hearing our children singing the songs our parents taught us."

"A more functional interpretation is that ethnic groups can provide valuable networks of trust in nascent markets. The obvious cost of such networks is, of course, that their very success may arouse the antagonism of other ethnic groups. Some 'market-dominant minorities' are especially vulnerable to discrimination and even expropriation; their tightly knit communities are economically strong but politically weak. While this may be true of the Chinese diaspora in parts of Asia today, it also has applicability to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War or the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second. However, because exceptions suggest themselves (the Scots were unquestionably a 'market-dominant minority' throughout the British Empire, but aroused minimal hostility), two qualifications need to be added. The first is that the economic dominance of a vulnerable minority may matter less than its political lack of dominance. It is not only wealthy minorities that are persecuted; by no means all the European Jews were rich, and the Sinti and Roma were among Europe's poorest people when the Nazis condemned them to annihilation. The crucial factor may have been their lack of formal and informal political representation. The second qualification is that, if an ethnic group is to be deprived of its rights, property or existence, it cannot be too well armed. Where there are two ethnic groups, both of which have weapons, civil war is more likely than genocide."

"In the United States, minority populations were never an indigestible mass—with the major exceptions of the one ethnic group that did not come here voluntarily (African Americans) and those who were here when Europeans arrived (American Indians). The rest all came, clustered and dispersed, and added new cultural layers to the general society. This has always been the strength of the United States."

"When people and especially political leaders tell [unconscionable] jokes about ethnic or other minorities, [Kazan Tatar political commentator] Ruslan Aysin says, that is part and parcel of a xenophobic campaign and opens the way to the oppression of these groups -- however much those who tell such jokes try to insist that their critics lack a sense of humor."

"I come more and more to the conclusion that one must take the side of the minority which is always the more intelligent one."

"Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and , emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed."

"The principle of brotherhood expounded by the agitator of Nazareth preserved the germ of life, of truth and justice, so long as it was the beacon light of the few."

"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."

"Experience tells us that sometimes, when minorities insist on their rights, they ultimately prevail."

"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion … while Truth again reverts to a new minority."

"True, since the Minority is necessarily weaker (physically, that is to say quantitatively) than the Majority, its power can only derive from its Authority (minority regimes are necessarily 'authoritarian'). But this Authority never derives from the fact that the Minority is a Minority. The 'justification' ('propaganda') is always of the kind: "even though we are only a minority, we . . ." The Authority that is endorsed by a Minority 'justifies' itself or explains itself by 'quality' and not by quantity. (Even the 'snob' claims to belong to the elite and not to the minority.)"

"The people who suffer genuinely in majoritarian dictatorships are "only" minorities. The plebiscitarian dictatorship always favors (or intends to favor) the majorities. If the herdist spirit is strong the minorities will be automatically disliked for the mere fact that they dare to be "different." The hatred of the democratic masses for the minorities is the driving force and the cement for these "democratic" dictatorships under popular leaders. Such minorities are the members of royal families, capitalists, priests, Jews, aristocrats, intellectuals, artists, highbrows, cripples, nuns, criminals, and lunatics. The persecution of the middle classes in Russia was only possible because this class was small. In Germany this class is strong. It may be educated to hate all "irregular" people without pity."

"In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority."

"In republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority."

"What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil."

"Without promoting fraternity, our democracy cannot survive. And the dangerous demonisation of minorities has to be countered, as it is this hate which gets transformed into intense violence."

"The moment a mere numerical superiority by either states or voters in this country proceeds to ignore the needs and desires of the minority, and for their own selfish purpose or advancement, hamper or oppress that minority, or debar them in any way from equal privileges and equal rights—that moment will mark the failure of our constitutional system."

"[Popular government] rests in the common sense, and the self-restraint of the American people. It rests in the knowledge of the majority that it must keep within the checks of the law and the Constitution if the Government is to be preserved. And it must rest in the view that the minority that it is much more important that the government should be sustained than that the minority should have for the time being control of or a voice in the government. It rests in the knowledge of the majority that the rights of the minority and in the individuals of that minority are exactly as sacred as the rights in the individuals of the majority."

"A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."

"The presence of different nations under the same sovereignty...provides against the servility which flourishes under the shadow of a single authority. ... Liberty provokes diversity, and diversity preserves liberty by supplying the means of organisation. ... This diversity in the same State is a firm barrier against the intrusion of the government beyond the political sphere which is common to all into the social department which escapes legislation and is ruled by spontaneous laws. This sort of interference is characteristic of an absolute government, and is sure to provoke a reaction, and finally a remedy. That intolerance of social freedom which is natural to absolutism is sure to find a corrective in the national diversities, which no other force could so efficiently provide. The co-existence of several nations under the same State is a test, as well as the best security of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism."

"One of the difficult problems of the world was to secure peace, freedom, and democratic government in countries inhabited by more than one community. It could not be done by one community seeking to dominate the others, but only by fair dealing and mutual tolerance. He sometimes thought that those who adopted extreme nationalist ideas did so because they had no constructive ideas and because an appeal to race prejudice saved them from an intolerable burden of thought. In his view the variations in the make-up of a community increased its value."

"A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice."

"Every person, every race, every nation, has its own particular keynote which it brings to the general chord of life and of humanity. Life is not a monotone but a many-stringed harmony, and to this harmony is contributed a distinctive note by each individual."

"A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from realizing the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests."

"Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many common features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual—these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion."

"I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity."

"A foundational assumption of the dogma of diversity, as proselytized on college campuses, is that a community becomes stronger when its members don’t have much in common. And further: When we dwell upon—indeed, fetishize—the superficial differences of sex, race, or ethnicity, we will be stronger still. This is a dumbass idea. Yet it is seldom held up for examination or debate. It should be obvious that no multicultural paradise would be possible at all if its citizens weren’t free to peaceably express their diverse views. Free speech is prior to diversity, as the philosophers say. It is a necessary condition of diversity, and probably diversity’s greatest guarantor. To extol inclusion at the expense of speech is incoherent and unserious—a mere reflex of campus ideology in our era of discontent. Unserious, yes, but not unprecedented."

"Well, I could be wrong, but I believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era."

"In all your communications, be conscious of your group’s diversity. The group you’re speaking with is likely more diverse than what you’re used to. There may be children and teenagers as well as adults. For many or most, English won’t be their first language. They probably live in multiple countries, have had a broad diversity of experiences, and and hold a wide array of beliefs. This creates a bunch of potential pitfalls. Your jokes may fall flat or offend people. Cultural references (sports, movies, history) may be meaningless. Even for those of us who aren’t American, it’s easy to come across as U.S.-centric. Metaphors, allusions and convoluted sentence structures may not be worth the time they’d take readers to untangle, and make translations much more difficult. High diversity argues for a style that’s literal, straightforward, and well-structured."

"Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences."

"If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

"Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired."

"Leisure for reflection, somewhere near the end of a long career, leads me to thank God for allowing me to live in a society sufficiently free of Governmental control to allow the citizenry expression of its true diversity, which is to say, diversity of thought."

"In the Mahabharata, the ceremony for the oath of a new king includes the admonition: 'Be like a garland-maker, O king, and not like a charcoal burner.' The garland symbolizes social coherence; it is a metaphor for dharmic diversity in which flowers of many colors and forms are strung harmoniously for the most pleasing effect. In contrast, the charcoal burner is a metaphor for the brute-force reduction of diversity into homogeneity, where diverse living substances are transformed into uniformly lifeless ashes."

"Whenever two religions are brought into contact, when members of each live together in peace, abstaining from all direct attempts at conversion, whether by force or by argument, though conscious all the time of the fact that they and their religion are on their trial, that they are being watched, that they are responsible for all they say and do—the effect has always been the greatest blessing to both. It calls out all the best elements in each, and at the same time keeps under all that is felt to be of doubtful value, of uncertain truth. Whenever this has happened in the history of the world, it has generally led either to the reform of both systems, or to the foundation of a new religion."

"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man, to profit withal. For to one is given, by the Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge, by the same Spirit; To another, faith by the same Spirit; to another, the gifts of healing, by the same Spirit; To another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, divers kinds of tongues; to another, the interpretation of tongues. But all these worketh that one and the self-same Spirit, dividing to every man severally, as he will."

"Inter-racial trust is relatively high in homogeneous South Dakota and relatively low in heterogeneous San Francisco or Los Angeles. The more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them... In highly diverse Los Angeles or San Francisco...roughly 30 percent of the inhabitants say that they trust their neighbours "a lot", whereas in the ethnically homogeneous communities of North and South Dakota, 70–80 percent of the inhabitants say the same. In more diverse communities, people trust their neighbours less."

"[I]n more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do... Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to "hunker down" – that is, to pull in like a turtle."

"Diversity does not produce "bad race relations" or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Note that this pattern encompasses attitudes and behaviour, bridging and bonding social capital, public and private connections. Diversity, at least in the short term, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us."

"Because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world."

"Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there."

"The current ideology of religious harmony emphasizes similarity—different religions are harmonious because they say the same thing; The older doctrine of multiple paths lays stress on their diversity—these paths are valid because they serve genuine different needs and answer to different natures. In short, they serve humanity not by being the same but by being different."

"There are a great number of LGBT people across 'Star Trek' fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different — the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian. 'Star Trek' is about acceptance and the strength of the Starship Enterprise is that it embraces diversity in all its forms."

"Bhinnêka Tunggal Ika, the national motto of Indonesia, literally means “different, yet the same” referring to the Buddha and Śiva, and it is usually rendered as “unity in diversity”. The phrase is from the Kakawin Sutosoma, a fourteenth century poem in Old Javanese, by Mpu Tantular. The stanza is as follows: Rwāneka dhātu winuwus Buddha Wiswa Bhinnêki rakwa ring apan kena parwanosen, Mangka ng Jinatwa kalawan Śiwatatwa tunggal Bhinnêka tunggal ika tan hana dharma mangrwa. The Buddha and Viśva[nātha] are known as different realms They are different, but how to know this difference For the truth of Jina (Buddha) and Śiva is one They are different, yet same, for truth knows no duality."

""Diversity" has become an omnipresent emblem of openness and fairness. It is now an essential component of corporate responsibility: there is a widespread expectation for companies to show their commitment to "diversity", elements of a "diversity" policy and evidence (e.g., smiling pictures) of a diverse workforce in annual reports, websites, promotional and recruitment materials."

"Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?"

"Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.""

"You must remember, once more, that expectations are the blocks with which you build your reality. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"Che quant' era più ornata, era più brutta."

"When my modiste first tried it on me I asked if she was dressing me for an opera or an operation."

"To a woman, the consciousness of being well-dressed gives a sense of tranquillity which religion fails to bestow."

"When in doubt, wear red."

"To treat a poor wretch with a bottle of Burgundy, or fill his snuff-box, is like giving a pair of laced ruffles to a man that has ne'er a shirt on his back."

"We dress more or less the same. I mean, I pay more for my clothes, but they look cheap when I put them on."

"Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new."

"His locked, lettered, braw brass collar, Shewed him the gentleman and scholar."

"But I do mean to say, I have heard her declare, When at the same moment she had on a dress Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less, And jewelry worth ten times more, I should guess, That she had not a thing in the wide world to wear!"

"Around his form his loose long robe was thrown, And wrapt a breast bestowed on heaven alone."

"Where is our acknowledgement of God if our thoughts are fixed on the glamour of our garments?"

"I wanted to give a woman comfortable clothes that would flow with her body. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well-dressed."

"Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman."

"Do you wish to honor the Body of the Savior? Do not despise it when it is naked. Do not honor it in church with silk vestments while outside it is naked and numb with cold. He who said, “This is my body,” and made it so by his word, is the same that said, “You saw me hungry and you gave me no food. As you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.” Honor him then by sharing your property with the poor. For what God needs is not golden chalices but golden souls."

"Dress drains our cellar dry, And keeps our larder lean; puts out our fires And introduces hunger, frost, and woe, Where peace and hospitality might reign."

"Not caring, so that sumpter-horse the back Be hung with gaudy trappings, with what coarse, Yea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul."

"Thy clothes are all the soul thou hast."

"Beauty when most unclothed is clothed best."

"He that is proud of the rustling of his silks, like a madman, laughs at the ratling of his fetters. For indeed, Clothes ought to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency."

"Bhikkhus, this Kassapa is content with any kind of robe, and he speaks in praise of contentment with any kind of robe, and he does not engage in a wrong search, in what is improper, for the sake of a robe. If he does not get a robe he is not agitated, and if he gets one he uses it without being tied to it, uninfatuated with it, not blindly absorbed in it, seeing the danger in it, understanding the escape. ..."

"And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."

"They stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colours."

"A night-cap deck'd his brows instead of bay, A cap by night,—a stocking all the day."

"It's like sending them ruffles, when wanting a shirt."

"The nakedness of the indigent world may be clothed from the trimmings of the vain."

"Vestis facit virum."

"I like those stylish clothes you wear, and I like the way you brush your hair!"

"It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes!"

"I wear my sort of clothes to save me the trouble of deciding which clothes to wear."

"A sweet disorder in the dresse Kindles in cloathes a wantonnesse."

"A winning wave, (deserving note). In the tempestuous petticote: A carelesse shooe-string, in whose tye I see a wilde civility: Doe more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part."

"La ropa no da ciencia."

"After all, there is something about a wedding-gown prettier than in any other gown in the world."

"Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect."

"Apes are apes though clothed in scarlet."

"The most important thing to remember is that you can wear all the greatest clothes and all the greatest shoes, but you’ve got to have a good spirit on the inside. That’s what’s really going to make you look like you’re ready to rock the world."

"One is never over- or underdressed with a little black dress."

"Jogging pants are a sign of defeat. You've lost control of your life, so you go out in jogging pants."

"Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it."

"Dwellers in huts and in marble halls— From Shepherdess up to Queen— Cared little for bonnets, and less for shawls, And nothing for crinoline. But now Simplicity's not the rage, And it's funny to think how cold The dress they wore in the Golden Age Would seem in the Age of Gold."

"A woman’s dress should be a like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.”"

"Let thy attyre bee comely, but not costly."

"“I'm a Catholic girl, so I used to worry I was 'an occasion of sin.' That was the expression if your clothes were too short and someone had lusting thoughts about you—you were 'an occasion of sin.'" "I always worried as a little boy (and still do) that I wasn't 'an occasion of sin.' Will I ever, in my lifetime, be worthy of such a compliment, such a desired reverse state of grace?""

"In naked beauty more adorned More lovely than Pandora."

"It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable."

"If I’m going dancing, then I wear the highest heels with the shortest dress."

"Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

"The dress should be the setting and not the gem."

"And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their private parts; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their khimār over their breasts and not display their beauty except to their husband, their fathers, their husband's fathers, their sons, their husbands' sons, their brothers or their brothers' sons, or their sisters' sons, or their women, or the slaves whom their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex; and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments."

"O Prophet! Enjoin your wives, your daughters, and the wives of true believers that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad): That is most convenient, that they may be distinguished and not be harassed."

"You're born naked. The rest is drag."

"Nobody can tell us Christians how to dress, how to live or how to pray."

"The soul of this man is his clothes."

"Thou villain base, Know'st me not by my clothes?"

"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man."

"See where she comes, apparell'd like the spring."

"So tedious is this day, As is the night before some festival To an impatient child, that hath new robes, And may not wear them."

"With silken coats, and caps, and golden rings, With ruffs, and cuffs, and farthingales, and things; With scarfs, and fans, and double change of bravery, With amber bracelets, beads, and all this knavery."

"He will come to her in yellow stockings, and 'tis a color she abhors; and cross-gartered, a fashion she detests."

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."

"Her cap, far whiter than the driven snow, Emblem right meet of decency does yield."

"She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork."

"So for thy spirit did devise Its Maker seemly garniture, Of its own essence parcel pure,— From grave simplicities a dress, And reticent demureness, And love encinctured with reserve; Which the woven vesture would subserve. For outward robes in their ostents Should show the soul's habiliments. Therefore I say,—Thou'rt fair even so, But better Fair I use to know."

"Her polish'd limbs, Veil'd in a simple robe, their best attire; Beyond the pomp of dress; for Loveliness Needs not the foreign aid of ornament, But is, when unadorn'd, adorn'd the most."

"O fair undress, best dress! it checks no vein, But every flowing limb in pleasure drowns, And heightens ease with grace."

"She's adorned Amply, that in her husband's eye looks lovely,— The truest mirror that an honest wife Can see her beauty in!"

"How his eyes languish! how his thoughts adore That painted coat, which Joseph never wore! He shows, on holidays, a sacred pin. That touch'd the ruff, that touched Queen Bess' chin."

"Their feet through faithless leather met the dirt, And oftener chang'd their principles than shirt."

"Our dress and grooming should be in keeping with godly principles. We would not think of appearing before a prominent person if we were slovenly dressed or our clothes were too casual. How much more concerned we should be when representing Jehovah in the field ministry or on the platform! Our grooming and clothing styles can influence how others view the worship of Jehovah."

"Kleiden machen Leute: nicht Leute von Verstand."

"I enjoy getting dressed as a Barbie doll."

"Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us."

"Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them."

"Old Grimes is dead; that good old man We never shall see more; He used to wear a long black coat, All button'd down before."

"Old Rose is dead, that good old man, We ne'er shall see him more; He used to wear an old blue coat All buttoned down before."

"Old Abram Brown is dead and gone,— You'll never see him more; He used to wear a long brown coat That buttoned down before."

"John Lee is dead, that good old man,— We ne'er shall see him more: He used to wear an old drab coat All buttoned down before."

"It is not linen you're wearing out, But human creatures' lives."

"A vest as admir'd Voltiger had on, Which from this island's foes his grandsire won; Whose artful colour pass'd the Tyrian dye, Oblig'd to triumph in this legacy."

"A painted vest Prince Voltiger had on, Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won."

"They were attempting to put on Raiment from naked bodies won."

"Still to be neat, still to be drest, As you were going to a feast, Still to be powder'd, still perfum'd. Lady, it is to be presumed, Though art's hid causes are not found, All is not sweet, all is not sound."

"Each Bond-street buck conceits, unhappy elf; He shows his clothes! alas! he shows himself. O that they knew, these overdrest self-lovers, What hides the body oft the mind discovers."

"Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet; In short, my deary, kiss me! and be quiet."

"When this old cap was new 'Tis since two hundred years."

"He was a wight of high renowne, And thosne but of a low degree: Itt's pride that putts the countrye downe, Man, take thine old cloake about thee."

"My galligaskins, that have long withstood The winter's fury, and encroaching frosts, By time subdued (what will not time subdue!) An horrid chasm disclosed."

"May I take off clothes covering shame at the border leaving them hanging on dry trees of arrogance and run by wearing the rays of the sun."

"Now old Tredgortha's dead and gone, We ne'er shall see him more; He used to wear an old grey coat, All buttoned down before."

"Attired to please herself: no gems of any kind She wore, nor aught of borrowed gloss in Nature's stead; And, then her long, loose hair flung deftly round her head Fell carelessly behind."

"There’s a stupid rumor. The most ridiculous rumor I think I’ve ever had about me. It’s crazy. To think I would be that vain – I respect mothers and women so much and to be able to experience bringing a child into this world, if you’re lucky and fortunate enough to experience that, I would never, ever take that for granted. It’s the most powerful thing you can do. Especially after losing a child, the pain and trauma from that just makes it mean so much more to get an opportunity to bring life into the world. It seems like people should have boundaries."

"Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available."

"In all cases the best antidote to rumour is the truth, however painful."

"Springfield McKenna didn’t place much faith in rumors. She’d traded in them far too long to lend credence to someone else’s social munitions."

"I'm tired of rumors starting, I'm sick of being followed. I'm tired of people lying, saying what they want about me."

"Rumors flew like bats at dusk."

"I will be gone: That pitiful rumour may report my flight, To consolate thine ear."

"Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it."

"Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, The numbers of the fear'd."

"It ain't that I'm too big to listen to the rumors, it's just that I'm too damned big to pay attention to 'em."

"Vana quoque ad veros accessit fama timores."

"Hi narrata ferunt alio; mensuraque ficti Crescit et auditus aliquid novus adjicit auctor."

"Nam inimici famam non ita ut nata est ferunt."

"The flying rumours gather'd as they roll'd, Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who heard it made enlargements too."

"I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me."

"The rolling fictions grow in strength and size, Each author adding to the former lies."

"What some invent the rest enlarge."

"Ad calamitatem quilibet rumor valet."

"Haud semper erret fama; aliquando et elegit."

"There is nothing which cannot be perverted by being told badly."

"Tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not."

"Extemplo Libyæ magnas it Fama per urbes: Fama malum quo non velocius ullum; Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo; Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras, Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubilia condit. * * * * * * Monstrum, horrendum ingens; cui quot sunt corpore plumæ Tot vigiles oculi subter, mirabile dictu, Tot linguæ, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures."

"Fama volat parvam subito vulgata per urbem."

"Linguæ centum sunt, oraque centum Ferrea vox."

"No honest historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics."

"History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided."

"Escapists take refuge in cliches such as “Human nature will never change” and “History always repeats itself!” Nevertheless, human nature is changing before our eyes, and quite new history is being made. This century has seen world war for the first time. It has seen a world civilization threatened with self-destruction, not only through war but through the exploitation of all the kingdoms in nature. It has also seen the beginnings of international alignment and collaboration. It has seen the leaders of the people struggling with great patience to work out a new political approach from the ‘world’ angle. It has seen the people themselves taking increasing individual and collective action in order to obtain a world organization or government, a universal religion, or a universal language. Let us avoid being misled by the apparent irresponsibility of the crowd with its absorption in crime films, dog racing and gambling, and its immorality and apathy!... It is traditional for the outstanding leaders of humanity to work for the shaping of history. It is a new procedure when a large and ever growing section of the public begins to take responsibility for the trend of evolution to such purpose that the community is increasingly honeycombed with progressive movements of every possible kind. This is the new element in history which constitutes a mighty landmark in the development of mankind."

"There are two ways of summing up world history, the inner way and the outer way. Both have been at the mercy of scribes and policies. We must use our divinely-given intuition in order to arrive near to the truth. Let us begin by realizing that the story of human evolution has progressed steadily from complete exclusiveness to an ever broadening inclusiveness. At first it was built up around the self-interest of the family unit. Later the ring-pass-not enlarged to include the tribe. The tribal communities finally produced the small state or nation. The aggressive self-interest of nations eventually produced Empires. Everything outside of the Empire was potential enemy or potential prey. Finally came the conceptions of Federation and of Commonwealth. This saw the emergence of a new concept of co-operation instead of tyranny, and of the rights of the individual instead of those of the autocrat. Nevertheless, even the most benign and powerful of these nation-groups had still to consider everything outside of itself as potential enemy, and therefore self-interest still ruled."

"The past is a pointer to the future. If we can understand the past and follow the trend of development throughout history we shall be more sure of where we are going. History tells us of wars and conquests and empires and revolutions, of cities and cultures, and of religions and persecutions. Yet actually it is a rather superficial survey. It leaves out almost entirely one vital part of the picture — the most important part. It has very little to say of man’s purpose in living, of his understanding of the reason of his existence and of his conception of life around him, and his interpretation of the mysteries of creation and evolution. So little does history say about this aspect of man — the mainspring and motive of his living — that we are left guessing about the most important part of the story — the extent of man’s actual knowledge throughout the ages... We are given superficial and rather materialistic details of the outward forms and the bitter strife which accompanied the development of the various religions as they were interpreted and practised by the people, much of which leaves us with an impression of brutal and bigoted primitiveness."

"The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History."

"I was not speaking of minor ripples in the mainstream of history—certainly those are ruled by chance. But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you."

"History repeats itself."

"History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself."

"The recognition of the role and importance of subjectivity in the construction of histories does, by implication, negate the possibility for objectivity in the writing of history. But there will always be historical narrative and, consequently, a narrative voice, be it hidden in the syntactical structure of the writing by, for instance, the absence of first person or the use of simple past tense. But this is a sleight of hand which gives the reader a sense of immediate contact with the past without the presence of an interlocutor. This apparently ‘unmediated’ contact gives history a kind of privileged status of objective knowledge"

"Historical reality is then a 'referential illusion', in which we try to grasp the reality (the referent of language) that we believe lies beyond the barrier of the linguistic construction of its narratives. In this way history becomes a Myth or an ideology as it purports to be reality. Indeed, storytelling is often seen as one of the most important functions of writing histories and fundamental to the nature of the discipline."

"Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind."

"Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction."

"All things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle."

"Our prevailing notions of history are exceedingly narrow and exceedingly selective. And basically the process of selection is one that aims to reassure ourselves that the myths that we believe in can be sustained. ... Recognize the truths, the realities that I want to and ignore the ones that I find inconvenient."

"Ghosts of my history will follow me there/And the winds of the old days will blow through my hair"

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian."

"History is of two kinds—there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events—a scandalous chronicle."

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history."

"The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution—today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions—no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake."

"The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin."

"“Have you studied history, Anna?” “Yes. The information is limited, the interpretation is partial. But it is interesting.”"

"Take one of Voltaire's swift shining shafts of wit: "History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead." Ah, yes, how true it is, we say; and we are astonished that Voltaire could have been so profound. Then we realize that he did not really mean it. To him it was a witticism intended to brand dishonest historians, whereas we perceive that it formulated, in the neatest possible way, a profound truth — the truth that all historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind."

"History held counterexamples to any facile rule."

"Mrs. Lintott: Now. How do you define history, Mr. Rudge? Rudge: Can I speak freely, Miss? Without being hit? Mrs. Lintott: I will protect you. Rudge: How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another."

"History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side."

"HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."

"If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future."

"Unpredictable events, or the coincidence of vital events happening side by side, play their part in history. In the emerging of the United States of America, the South American nations, South Africa, Canada and Australia the unforeseen mixture of events was especially powerful in the final decades of the 18th century."

"The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era."

"With all regimes, there is what might be called an official interpretation of the past that makes it appear defective or just a step on the way to the present regime."

"I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples."

"The dignity of history."

"History is not to serve as the handmaid of a particular school of thought. History must be impartial and objective. To rewrite the history, according to the views which are popular or which are necessary for bolstering up nationalistic egoism or jingoism is perversion of history."

"On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends, “In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin.” Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of the governments has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity."

"Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker depart from this world and the lies remain."

"Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view."

"History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy."

"History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it."

"God cannot alter the past, historians can"

"What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history — and you certainly see that in financial markets all the time."

"History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another."

"What want these outlaws conquerors should have But History's purchased page to call them great?"

"And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page."

"History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club."

"History, a distillation of rumor."

"Happy the people whose annals are tiresome."

"No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men."

"Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul."

"History is the essence of innumerable Biographies."

"History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought."

"All history … is an inarticulate Bible."

"All history is a Bible—a thing stated in words by me more than once."

"Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books."

"The historian and the facts of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. My first answer therefore to the question, What is History?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past."

"The historian, then, is an individual human being. Like other individuals, he is also a social phenomenon, both the product and the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs; it is in this capacity that he approaches the facts of the historical past. We sometimes speak of the course of history as a ‘moving procession’. The metaphor is fair enough, provided it does not tempt the historian to think of himself as an eagle surveying the scene from a lonely crag or as a V.I.P. at the saluting base. Nothing of the kind! The historian is just another dim figure trudging along in another part of the procession. And as the procession winds along, swerving now to the right and now to the left, and sometimes doubling back on itself, the relative positions of different parts of the procession are constantly changing, so that it may make perfectly good sense to say, for example, that we are nearer today to the Middle Ages than were our great-grandfathers a century ago, or that the age of Caesar is nearer to us than the age of Dante. New vistas, new angles of vision, constantly appear as the procession – and the historian with it – moves along. The historian is part of history. The point in the procession at which he finds himself determines his angle of vision over the past."

"History therefore is a process of selection in terms of historical significance. To borrow Talcott Parsons’s phrase once more, history is ‘a selective system’ not only of cognitive, but of causal, orientations to reality. Just as from the infinite ocean of facts the historian selects those which are significant for his purpose, so from the multiplicity of sequences of cause and effect he extracts those, and only those, which are historically significant; and the standard of historical significance is his ability to fit them into his pattern of rational explanation and interpretation."

"History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him."

"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species-man-acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman."

""Woe to the vanquished" (Vae victis) in history as on the battle-field."

"The one-sided class war of the last 40 years is becoming two-sided. The population is actually beginning to participate instead of just accepting the hammer blows."

"We should recognize that white male supremacy is a deep current in American history. It’s not gonna go away immediately. But there have been dents, significant ones. So for example, even in the mainstream, when the New York Times ran the 1619 Project, it couldn’t have happened a couple of years earlier. And it’s because of changes in general consciousness and awareness. Of course, there was an immediate backlash, strong backlash, and you’re gonna expect that, white male supremacy is a deep part of American history and culture."

"The Coronavirus is serious enough but it's worth recalling that there is a much greater horror approaching, we are racing to the edge of disaster, far worse than anything that's ever happened in human history.... Donald Trump & his minions are in the lead, in racing to the abyss. In fact there are two immense threats that we are facing. One is the growing threat of Nuclear war, which has exacerbated it by the tearing what's left of the arms control regime and the other of course is the growing threat of global warming. Both threats can be dealt with but there isn't a lot of time... the corona virus is a horrible... can have terrifying consequences but there will be recovery, while the others won't be recovered, it's finished. If we don't deal with them we're done."

"The current administration had ample warning about a likely pandemic. In fact, a high-level simulation was run as recently as last October. Trump has reacted during his years in office in the manner to which we have become accustomed: by defunding and dismantling every relevant part of government and assiduously implementing the instructions of his corporate masters to eliminate the regulations that impede profits while saving lives — and leading the race to the abyss of , by far his greatest crime — in fact, the greatest crime in history when we consider the consequences."

"If you look over the history of regulation — railroad regulation, financial regulation and so on — you find that, quite commonly, it's either initiated by the economic concentrations that are being regulated, or it's supported by them. And the reason is because they know that, sooner or later, they can take over the regulators and essentially run what they do. They can offer what amounts to bribes — offer them jobs or whatever it may be — it's an advantage to the regulators to accommodate themselves to the will of the powerful. It happens naturally in many ways, and ends up with what's called “regulatory capture.” The business being regulated is in fact running the regulators."

"The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated... Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why — they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn... of all the major powers, they've been the least aggressive militarily."

"Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils. And in fact I think you'd find it hard to discover a mass murderer in history who didn't think that."

"There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much."

"There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known. It's called sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of a network... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early industrial revolution. That's why so many wars took place around the Caribbean."

"Armies usually aren't interested in wars. They like preparation for war. But they have an understandable reluctance to fight a war. So I think if you look at, at least the history that I know, it's usually the civilian leadership who is pushing the military to do something. It was the case in the early days of the Vietnam War."

"Before there were any suicide bombers, it was also reported by the same sources that Saddam Hussein was giving $10,000 to the families of anyone who was killed by Israeli atrocities, and there were plenty of them. Well, should he've been doing that? So let's take the first month of the current intifada. I'm just relying now on IDF sources. What they say is, that in the first few days of the intifada, the Israeli army fired a million bullets. One of the high military officers said 'that means one bullet for every child'. Within the first month of the intifada, they killed about 70 people. Using U.S. helicopters, and in fact Clinton shipped new helicopters to Israel as soon as they started using them against civilians. That's just the first month. And it goes on, no suicide bombers. At the time, it was reported that Saddam Hussein was giving $10,000 to every family. Well, is that supporting terror? It seems to me, sending helicopters to Israel when they're using them to attack apartment complexes, that's supporting terror."

"Pointing to the massive amounts of propaganda spewed by government and institutions around the world, observers have called our era the age of Orwell. But the fact is that Orwell was a latecomer on the scene. As early as World War I, American historians offered themselves to President Woodrow Wilson to carry out a task they called "historical engineering," by which they meant designing the facts of history so that they would serve state policy. In this instance, the U.S. government wanted to silence opposition to the war. This represents a version of Orwell's 1984, even before Orwell was writing."

"Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and arguably the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam. Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and Cambodia. The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell."

"Yet to enter approved memory is the "finale" described in the official Air Force history, a 1000-plane raid on civilian targets organized by General "Hap" Arnold to celebrate the war's end, five days after Nagasaki. According to survivors, leaflets were dropped among the bombs announcing the surrender."

"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."

"Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum."

"Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?"

"A serious, honest mind understands—and can understand—nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic."

"I turn to the past to learn its story without any preconceived opinion what that story may be. I do not assume that one period or one line of study is more instructive than another, but I am ready to recognise the real identity of man's aspiration at all times. Some episodes in history are regarded as profoundly modern; others are dismissed contemptuously as concerned with trifles. In some ages there are great heroes, in others the actors are sunk in indolence and sloth. For my own part I do not recognise this great distinction."

"The value of history ... is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."

"Every decade or so, the world is tested by a crisis so grave that it breaks the mould: one so horrific and inhumane that the response of politicians to it becomes emblematic of their generation —their moral leadership or cowardice, their resolution or incompetence. It is how history judges us."

"Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree."

"The purpose of history is to explain the present—to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us why the things we value are the things we should value. And it tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power—profound power. The power to define a whole society."

"Those who cannot forget the past, are doomed to repeat it."

"When we say, “That’s history,” it’s a pejorative. Well, the rest of the world takes history pretty seriously."

"While we read history we make history... Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer."

"Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist, writing hundreds and thousands of books on British history, French history, German history, Russian history, American history, Chinese history, Indian history, Brazilian history or whatever. Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. As soon as great powers arise, whether the United States in the twentieth century or China in the twenty-first, the call goes out for offerings on American History or Chinese History, and siren voices sing that today’s important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored."

"Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice."

"It is easy to argue persuasively the truism that the lessons of history are best derived from what actually happened, rather than from what nearly happened. It should be added, however, that what happened becomes more fully comprehensible in the light of the contending forces that existed at moments of decision. Understanding of the total historical setting is bound to contribute to a clearer view of the actual course of affairs."

"History is philosophy teaching by examples."

"The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples."

"Assassination has never changed the history of the world."

"G. H. Hardy in his apology for pure mathematics placed high among his arguments that the subject was "harmless". I can – alas – make no such plea for history. The correct use of historical study may be debatable, but the consequences of its abuse have been made plain for all the world to see. The propagandist use of history in the Germany of yesterday, in the Russia of today, is a fact of incalculable importance to the future fate of the world. An ignorance of history inviting its fabrications by the unscrupulous cannot be regarded simply as an innocuous academic failure. It has affected all our lives. It has led directly to Belsen and Buchenwald and Katyn Wood. It has contributed its full share to two major European disasters."

"I claim for students of history that their study – if properly conducted – can strip the mind of illusions, leading them from heady abstraction back to men and women in their infinite diversity – warning them, by reference to actuality, against this or that ideology which oversimplifies the past under a single formula or promises the millenium the day after tomorrow."

"We can only understand the present by continually referring to and studying the past; when any one of the intricate phenomena of our daily life puzzles us; when there arises religious problems, political problems, race problems, we must always remember that while their solution lies in the present, their cause and their explanation lie in the past."

"The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law. ... In this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of building a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy."

"Truth adulterated with romance poisons history."

"The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend."

"Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks."

"LOVE one another ... my final lesson of history, ... is the same as that of Jesus. . . . just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world."

"History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque."

"History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large."

"No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history."

"To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing."

"War is one of the constants of history ... and has not diminished with civilization or democracy."

"Que voulez-vous de plus? Il a inventé l'histoire."

"History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living."

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."

"Psychology has a long past, but only a short history."

"We are inclined to overemphasize the material influences in history. The Russians especially make this mistake. Intellectual values and ethnic influences, tradition and emotional factors are equally important. If this were not the case, Europe would today be a federated state, not a madhouse of nationalism."

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose. We must be willing, individually and as a Nation, to accept whatever sacrifices may be required of us. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."

"While a modern man, though regarding himself as the result of the course of Universal History, does not feel obliged to know the whole of it, the man of the archaic societies is not only obliged to remember mythical history but also to re-enact a large part of it periodically. It is here that we find the greatest difference between the man of the archaic societies and modern man: the irreversibility of events, which is the characteristic trait of History for the latter, is not a fact to the former."

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now"

"We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall see nothing, learn nothing, keep nothing."

"When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, when a truth that fired the soul of St. John, fires mine, time is no more."

"There is properly no history, only biography."

"Le bon historien n'est d'aucun temps ni d'aucun pays: quoiqu'il aime sa patrie, il ne la flatte jamais en rien."

"History’s darkest moments can be a tipping point for change."

"History, however, is not a linear narrative of progress. Rights may be won and taken away; gains are never complete or uncontested, and popular movements generate their own countervailing pressures."

"I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today."

"The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction."

"Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings."

"A defining feature of history is that there are many more black swans — not to mention what Didier Sornette calls “dragon kings,” events so large in scale that they lie beyond even a power-law distribution — than a normally distributed world would lead us to expect. All such events lie in the realm of uncertainty, not of calculable risk. Moreover, the world we have built has, over time, become an increasingly complex system prone to all kinds of random behavior, nonlinear relationships and “fat-tailed” distributions. A disaster such as a pandemic is not a single, discrete event. It invariably leads to other forms of disaster — economic, social and political. There can be, and often are, cascades or chain reactions of disaster. The more networked the world becomes, the more we see this."

"I disbelieve in both cycles of history and ends of history. History is the interaction of many complex systems. There are certain long-run processes (notably exponential gains in productivity through the development of technology and the “suprasecular” decline of nominal and real interest rates as a result of capital accumulation) punctuated by, well, one disaster after another. These disasters are either randomly distributed or follow a power law (i.e. there are lots of little earthquakes, pandemics or wars, but a few cataclysmic ones). At unpredictable intervals, the global system is tipped into a major transition by a disturbance that can be quite small, if not quite as small as Edward Lorenz’s famous butterfly in the Amazon setting off a tornado in Texas. Russia’s war in Ukraine — destructive certainly, but still a relatively small conflict by 20th-century standards — can be enough to trigger a “conflict avalanche.”"

"Today is Yesterday's Pupil."

""[T]his historian who seeks to mine the various quarries of the past in the belief that good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.”"

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

"History does not belong to us, we belong to it."

"“It can’t make things any worse.” “If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend."

"There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past."

"We tend to view history not as it was, but as we think it should have been."

"History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable."

"History can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated, by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion, to misunderstand its nature."

"[I]t is the historian's task to deal with the individual in relation to the community. Furthermore his task is a very different one from that of the novelist. Though the historian cannot do without imagination, he remains tied to the event, to data, to testimonies, and he lacks the omniscience which enables the poet to plumb his characters to the most secret places of their hearts."

"The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."

"History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveller."

"History teaches, but it has no pupils."

"History is at once freedom and necessity."

"Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit."

"And read their history in a nation's eyes."

"The great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the first step a tyrant takes toward enslaving a people is to steal their history, for in that case, no one has anything from the past with which to compare the present, and any horror can be normalized. ... It was once said, as a commercial joke, that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The same is true in this case, but not as a joke: It’s not nice to fool with history."

"History, if it should serve its purpose of stirring emotion, instigating inquiry and directing thought, must first of all be exciting. Is it impossible to be both truthful and warm-hearted, both factual and moving? Are imagination and conscience necessarily enemies to each other? In reconciling them is the art of the true historian. The flow of the story must be swift, vivid, vibrant."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means of making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine."

"What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it."

"A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future."

"There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present."

"The expansion of Europe was the transforming force in human history of the last 500 years, and yet the modern academy looks for reasons not to study it. In the era of decolonisation the new nations want to stress their indigenous roots and sympathetic scholars explain that European influence was not overwhelming, but that it was used and subverted by locals for local purposes. To concentrate on Europe is criticised as 'Eurocentric'. But to ignore Europe makes the history of any part of the globe unintelligible."

"It is not the neutrals or the lukewarm who make history."

"In this valley of trees and river and crystal, the fault lines of history broke."

"In the end, young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history."

"Most historical facts are unpleasant."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."

"What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing. What is worth knowing is mostly uncertain. Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter."

"History does not relate any true revolution which came from power. All began with education and meant in essence a moral summons."

"Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying."

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."

"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!"

"History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

"History is just as much a science as chemistry or physics. It has its own laws, it has its own logic."

"History is shaped by people operating as people do, making choices with their consciousness limited by material reality and by their perceptions of material reality. This means by their perceptions of possibility too. Simply put, if people don't think change is possible, they won't try."

"Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of our society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a particular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration."

"Because the litigated case creates a record, courts can become archives in which that record serves as the materialization of memory. Due process guarantees an opportunity to be heard by, and an opportunity to speak to, the future. It is the guarantee that legal institutions can be turned into museums of unnecessary, unjust, undeserved pain and death. The legal hearing provides lawyers and litigants an opportunity to write and record history by creating narratives of present injustices, and to insist on memory in the face of denial. By recording such history and constructing such narratives lawyers and litigants call on an imagined future to choose Justice over the “jurispathic” tendencies of the moment."

"Law is one site to both “remember the future” and to insure that the future remembers. Perhaps by paying attention to how law serves memory we can gain new understandings of law’s crucial role in knitting together our past, present and future. Perhaps by attending to the contestation that inevitably accompanies efforts to materialize memory in law we can gain a better understanding of the ways that social conflict plays itself out on the terrain of remembrance."

"I sometimes think that we are too much impressed by the clamor of daily events. The newspaper headlines and the television screens give us a short view. They so flood us with the stop-press details of daily stories that we lose sight of one of the great movements of history. Yet it is the profound tendencies of history and not the passing excitements that will shape our future."

"Beyond the drumfire of daily crisis, therefore, there is arising the outlines of a robust and vital world community, founded on nations secure in their own independence, and united by their allegiance to world peace. It would be foolish to say that this world will be won tomorrow, or the day after. The processes of history are fitful and uncertain and aggravating. There will be frustrations and setbacks. There will be times of anxiety and gloom. The specter of thermonuclear war will continue to hang over mankind; and we must heed the advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes of "freedom leaning on her spear" until all nations are wise enough to disarm safely and effectively. Yet we can have a new confidence today in the direction in which history is moving. Nothing is more stirring than the recognition of great public purpose. Every great age is marked by innovation and daring--by the ability to meet unprecedented problems with intelligent solutions. In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true than ever that knowledge is power; for only by true understanding and steadfast judgment are we able to master the challenge of history. If this is so, we must strive to acquire knowledge--and to apply it with wisdom."

"To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life."

"It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance."

"I think of myself as a historian more than as a statesman. As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren't realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved."

"The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations."

"Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it."

"...Jesus told us this a long time ago, and I can still hear that voice crying through the vista of time, saying, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." And there is still a voice saying to every potential Peter, "Put up your sword." History is replete with the bleached bones of nations, history is cluttered with the wreckage of communities that failed to follow this command."

"The history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the Negroes' sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy. All too many Negroes and whites are unaware of the fact that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed this country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. Negroes and whites are almost totally oblivious of the fact that it was a Negro physician, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first successful operation on the heart in America. Another Negro physician, Dr. Charles Drew, was largely responsible for developing the method of separating blood plasma and storing it on a large scale, a process that saved thousands of lives in World War II and has made possible many of the important advances in postwar medicine. History books have virtually overlooked the many Negro scientists and inventors who have enriched American life. Although a few refer to George Washington Carver, whose research in agricultural products helped to revive the economy of the South when the throne of King Cotton began to totter, they ignore the contribution of Norbert Rillieuz, whose invention of an evaporating pan revolutionized the process of sugar refining. How many people know that multimillion-dollar United Shoe Machinery Company developed from the shoe-lasting machine invented in the last century by a Negro from Dutch Guiana, Jan Matzelinger; or that Granville T. Woods, an expert in electric motors, whose many patents speeded the growth and improvement of the railroads at the beginning of this century, was a Negro?Even the Negroes' contribution to the music of America is sometimes overlooked in astonishing ways. In 1965 my oldest son and daughter entered an integrated school in Atlanta. A few months later my wife and I were invited to attend a program entitled "Music that has made America great." As the evening unfolded, we listened to the folk songs and melodies of the various immigrant groups. We were certain that the program would end with the most original of all American music, the Negro spiritual. But we were mistaken. Instead, all the students, including our children, ended the program by singing "Dixie"."

"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things, and drowns them in the depths of obscurity, no matter if they be quite unworthy of mention, or most noteworthy and important, and thus, as the tragedian says, "he brings from the darkness all things to the birth, and all things born envelops in the night." But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and to some extent checks its irresistible flow, and, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over, it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion."

"Generally when scholars talk about the relationship between history, memory, and law, the latter is thought of solely as a passive object of historical change. Legal history is regarded as the study of the forces that have shaped law. It is the history of the evolution of law with law perpetually lagging behind society and being pushed and pulled from the outside. This view, as rich and productive as it is, ignores what might be called an “internal” perspective, one that would examine law for the way it uses and writes history as well as for the ways in which it also become a site of memory and commemoration."

"While law responds to historical change, it also makes history. Law writes the past, not just its own past, but the past for those over whom law seeks to exercise its dominion. Law constructs a that it wants to present as authoritative, when, as Laura Kalman argues, no historian “considers the past authoritative.” And law uses history to tell us who we are."

"I think every historian's dream is to uncover a great treasure that no one else has seen and bring it to light."

"“History serves a specific and indispensable rhetorical role”"

"Kelly, “Clio and the Court,” 122; also Frederick Shauer, “Precedent,” Stanford Law Review 39 (1987): 571. Peter Burke asks, “What is the function of social memory?” He speculates that if a lawyer were asked, “[H]e or she might well discuss the importance of custom and precedent, the justification or legitimation of actions in the present with reference to the past.” History as Social Memory” in Memory History, Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 105."

"While there is contest about the meaning of the past, of the precise relevance of law’s history, to its present, there is little dispute about the place of an historical sensibility in legal decision making. Yet as we turn from history to memory this consensus disappears. To turn from history to memory is to move from the disciplined effort to marshal evidence about the “truth” of the past to the slippery terrain on which individuals and groups invent traditions and record partisan versions of the past on the basis of which they seek to construct particular conditions in the present. “Memory,” Pierre Nora writes, is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation. . . . [H]istory on the other hand, is the reconstruction . . . of what is no longer. . . . History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. . . . At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to . . . memory."

"The essays in this book also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshaling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process. Among the questions that they address are, How are the histories and memories created by law different by virtue of the site of their creation? Through what representational practices are the seeming continuities between past and present that are necessary to legitimize legal decisions constructed and preserved? Whose histories and memories “count” in law? What does history do to and for, law, and what does law do to history? Under what conditions do legal institutions, such as courts or prisons, becomes sites of memory?"

"The essays in “History, Memory, and the Law” deploy a wide range of theories in diverse contexts to show law’s role in commemoration and the ways it constructs its own history. Yet each illuminates the limits of law as a site of memory and as a reader and interpreter of history. Each also highlights it flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptability. No memory, no matter how important or powerful it would seem to be, reliably can be preserved in and through legal decisions and institutions. No memory, no matter how powerful or important it would seem to be, reliably can make its presence felt to open up, to correct, or to control law. And similarly, the history that law constructs, as well as the techniques used to construct, cannot ensure a certain outcome. Law’s history and its hermeneutics are neither linear nor immune to improvisations, inventions, and ingeniously artful readings. To study history and memory in law, then, is to be reminded of law’s almost inexhaustible capacity to be, and do, many complex and contradictory things, all the while denying the contradictions and plausibly proclaiming its “formal existence.”"

"Historians as a rule follow the main lines of history—the wars, the politics, the rise and fall of empires—yet the true history is that of the people themselves: where they lived, their ways of making a living, their inventions, discoveries, problem-solving, business dealings, and their relations with each other."

"We hope, plan, execute; will it be vain? Or will the future be the past again?"

"History hath but few pages—soon is told Man’s ordinary life, Labour, and care, and strife, Make up the constant chronicle of old."

"History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past."

"History is only true for the time being; each new generation of scholars rewrites the work of its predecessors. But such revisers rarely go back to the beginning and start from scratch. Instead they build uncritically on “generally accepted” foundations laid down by their predecessors. These traditional, established truths of history have a large symbolic component of which their exponents are usually unaware."

"There was a little bit of improvement in my son’s education, but Latin American and black contributions—and I don’t mean to lump us together—were nonexistent in my public school. Even when I went to college, there was nothing. When I was studying the Civil War, there was nothing about everything we did, not one mention of any participation or contribution, ever. And it would’ve changed my life."

"I started to think why people feel comfortable disrespecting us in a way that’s just not normal or natural. And I started to think that it's because our contributions aren't in history textbooks."

"What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History."

"History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence."

"Time travel dramas are becoming a hot theme for television and films. But the content and exaggerated performance style are questionable. Many stories are totally made up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty. Producers and writers are treating serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no means be encouraged anymore."

"What has once happened, will invariably happen again, when the same circumstances which combined to produce it, shall again combine in the same way."

"Maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present."

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;"

"History casts its shadow far into the land of song."

"They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again."

"We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history."

"I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history."

"History is a great teacher which can help us create a better world. But unfortunately the lessons of history are often ignored, sometimes deliberately. And because we ignore the lessons of history we keep on repeating the mistakes of the past and we suffer accordingly. This is what George Santayana meant when he said that if we ignore the lessons of history then we would be condemned to repeat our mistakes. The world of today gives the feeling of "deja vu", of having seen all these things before. Nothing new is really happening because we continue to commit the same mistakes, the same crimes and the same sins."

"There can be no one historical narrative that renders perfect justice (just as perhaps there is no judicial outcome that can capture the complexity of history)…"

"After all, history is no respecter of the feelings of persons and communities, and one cannot alter the facts of history."

"Firstly, that history is no respecter of persons or communities; secondly, that its sole aim is to find out the truth by following the canons commonly accepted as sound by all historians; and thirdly, to express the truth, without fear, envy, malice, passion, or prejudice, and irrespective of all extraneous considerations, both political and humane. In judging any remark or opinion expressed in such a history, the question to be asked is not whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, mild or strong, impolitic or imprudent, but simply whether it is true or false, just or unjust, and above all, whether it is or is not supported by the evidence at our disposal. (xxx)"

"History is experimental politics."

"Let us all remember: history makes us and we the people make history"

"The problem of locating photos often confirms the indifference to women’s presence in history, as reflected in the media, books, historical records, museums, university libraries."

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

"To seek to abolish history is the ambition of a fool. For a land without history is a barren island in an uncharted sea. To tear up the roots is to destroy the tree."

"The tales spun around the betrayal at Isstvan III filled entire wings of the Gallery of Pergamum. This was where the canker at the heart of the Legions was first revealed, where the Legions had first spilled the blood of their brothers in open warfare. Magnus had despatched cabal after cabal seeking truths from those who had fought in that battle, desiring to unravel its root causes. It seemed to Vistario to be a thankless task, for every adept of the Corvidae knew that nothing ever really began. There could be no single moment from which this or any other event sprang; the threads could always be followed to some earlier moment and the actions that preceded them. To attempt to pin any event's origin to a single moment in time would drive a mind to insanity."

"History admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief."

"The history of the world, or, as it is called, "Universal History," has laid open new avenues of thought, and it has enriched our language with a word which never passed the lips of Socrates or Plato, or Aristotle—mankind. Where the Greek saw barbarians, we see brethren; where the Greek saw heroes and demigods, we see our parents and ancestors; where the Greek saw nations, we see mankind, toiling and suffering, separated by oceans, divided by language, and severed by national enmity,— yet evermore tending, under a divine control, towards the fulfilment of that inscrutable purpose for which the world was created, and man placed in it, bearing the image of God. History, therefore, with its dusty and mouldering pages, is to us as sacred a volume as the book of nature. In both we read, or we try to read, the reflex of the laws and thoughts of a Divine Wisdom."

"To be a history in the true sense of the word, the work must be the story of the people inhabiting a country. It must be a record of their life from age to age presented through the life and achievements of men whose exploits become the beacon-lights of tradition; through the characteristic reaction of the people to physical and economic conditions; through political changes and vicissitudes which create the forces and conditions which operate upon life; through characteristic social institutions, beliefs and forms; through literary and artistic achievements; through the movements of thought which from time to time helped or hindered the growth of collective harmony; through those values which the people have accepted or reacted to and which created or shaped their collective will; through efforts of the people to will themselves into an organic unity. The central purpose of a history must, therefore, be to investigate and unfold the values which, age after age, have inspired the inhabitants of a country to develop their collective will and to express it through the manifold activities of their life."

"If Napoleon had nuclear subs, we'd all be speaking French. So, the history thing can be oversold."

"[O]ne's political ideology is inextricable from one's view of history."

"The relations of groups of men to plots of land, of organised communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history. The conflicting territorial claims of communities constitute the greater part of conscious international history; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from the relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always fully conscious part of the domestic history of nations—and even under urban and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed."

"Too much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft."

"What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon."

"The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment. Nonetheless, the human situation is so, and this is why I think that the Christian faith is right as against simple forms of secularism. That it believes that there is in man a radical freedom, and this freedom is creative but it is also destructive — and there's nothing that prevents this from being both creative and destructive. That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence."

"We must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically."

"The great historian John Hope Franklin, who helped to get this museum started, once said, “Good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.” He understood the best history doesn’t just sit behind a glass case; it helps us to understand what’s outside the case. The best history helps us recognize the mistakes that we’ve made and the dark corners of the human spirit that we need to guard against. And, yes, a clear-eyed view of history can make us uncomfortable, and shake us out of familiar narratives. But it is precisely because of that discomfort that we learn and grow and harness our collective power to make this nation more perfect."

"To tell the story of a past so as to portray an inevitable destiny is, for humankind, a need as universal as tool-making. To that extent, we may say that a human being is, by nature, historicus."

"Kids can understand that things can be racist and also other things. The Constitution can be revolutionary, and also racist. Movies can be romantic and also racist. Children's books can be charming, and also racist. Broadcasters can be incredibly successful and also racist. And if kids are taught an incomplete history, they'll either never get the full story, or when they do, they don't have the framework to understand how the pieces fit together."

"History, when taught well, shows us how to improve the world. But history when taught poorly falsely claims there is nothing to improve…"

"If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future."

"Man is no thing, but a drama... Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is... history."

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

"Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible... If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'..."

"The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?... To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself... That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink."

"We've always been at war with Eastasia."

"[I]f you don’t think history, you’re not thinking. You’re just not thinking if you cannot see a generation back. And if you do not think about the circumstances in their lives, then you don’t know what you’re thinking about. There’s no truth in the present moment. Now simply doesn’t exist without then at all."

"History is a graveyard of aristocracies."

"It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many."

"In Russia, history is something that, you know, used to be rewritten every five years. It's written once again, and it's just a game."

"Men write history for many reasons; to try to understand the forces which impel mankind along its strange course; to justify a religion, a nation, or a class; to make money; to fulfil ambition; to assuage obsession; and a few, the true creators, to ease the ache within."

"Just as geographers, O Sossius Senecio, crowd on to the outer edges of their maps the parts of the earth which elude their knowledge, with explanatory notes that "What lies beyond is sandy desert without water and full of wild beasts," or "blind marsh," or "Scythian cold," or "frozen sea," so in the writing of my Parallel Lives, now that I have traversed those periods of time which are accessible to probable reasoning and which afford basis for a history dealing with facts, I might well say of the earlier periods: "What lies beyond is full of marvels and unreality, a land of poets and fabulists, of doubt and obscurity."

"The past is just one long, smelly error until we get to the car, computer and iPod."

"This moment I am keener on the stories of valour washed away by this year's monsoon floods than the abstract shapes glued to myths, history and stories."

"Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web."

"Had previous chroniclers neglected to speak in praise of History in general, it might perhaps have been necessary for me to recommend everyone to choose for study and welcome such treatises as the present, since men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past. But all historians, one may say without exception, and in no half-hearted manner, but making this the beginning and end of their labour, have impressed on us that the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of History, and that surest and indeed the only method of learning how to bear bravely the vicissitudes of fortune, is to recall the calamities of others. Evidently therefore no one, and least of all myself, would think it his duty at this day to repeat what has been so well and so often said. For the very element of unexpectedness in the events I have chosen as my theme will be sufficient to challenge and incite everyone, young and old alike, to peruse my systematic history. For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government — a thing unique in history? Or who again is there so passionately devoted to other spectacles or studies as to regard anything as of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge?"

"There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes."

"History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time."

"History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history."

"Whenever you start digging into history, history is re-written all over again. The more you dig, the more you gain, and the more you lose faith from history."

"History has always changed its course, changed its stance, swaying to the tunes, pendulum like, between a Ruling Party and an Opposition Party."

"[History] hath triumphed over Time, which besides it, nothing but Eternity hath triumphed over."

"In a word, we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal; by the comparison and application of other men's forepassed miseries with our own like errors and ill deservings."

"To history has been attributed the function to judge the past, to instruct ourselves for the advantage of the future. Such a lofty function the present work does not attempt. It aims merely to show how it actually took place."

"Rigorous presentation of the facts, however conditional and lacking in beauty they may be, is without question the supreme law."

"The ultimate aim of historical writing is the bringing before us the whole truth."

"Classical history is concerned with political life, as lived in the Greek city states and the Roman republic and empire."

"History is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed."

"History till now has been like women's periods, a little egg of possibility, hidden in the ordinary material of life, with tiny barbarian hordes maybe charging in, trying to find it, failing, fighting each other—finally a bloody mess ends that chance, and everything has to start all over."

"The history of all peoples is full of bloody and revolting pages. So much blood has been spilled for every new construction, every new teaching or religion! That is why humanity urgently must learn the two great concepts — Tolerance and Cooperation. On these two foundations the New Epoch will be built."

"The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

"I know that all things pass away but history. History never dies. It is what defines us as a civilization, and we live out our collective histories every day, in ways both good and evil... History dies hard."

"Elementary education, in all advanced countries, is in the hands of the State. Some of the things taught are known to be false by the officials who prescribe them, and many others are known to be false, or at any rate very doubtful, by every unprejudiced person. Take, for example, the teaching of history. Each nation aims only at self-glorification in the school text-books of history. When a man writes his autobiography he is expected to show a certain modesty; but when a nation writes its autobiography there is no limit to its boasting and vainglory. When I was young, school books taught that the French were wicked and the Germans virtuous; now they teach the opposite. In neither case is there the slightest regard for truth. German school books, dealing with the battle of Waterloo, represent Wellington as all but defeated when Blücher saved the situation; English books represent Blücher as having made very little difference. The writers of both the German and the English books know that they are not telling the truth. American school books used to be violently anti-British; since the War they have become equally pro-British, without aiming at truth in either case (see The Freeman, Feb. 15, 1922, p. 532). Both before and since, one of the chief purposes of education in the United States has been to turn the motley collection of immigrant children into “good Americans.” Apparently it has not occurred to any one that a “good American,” like a “good German” or a “good Japanese,” must be, pro tanto, a bad human being. A “good American” is a man or woman imbued with the belief that America is the finest country on earth, and ought always to be enthusiastically supported in any quarrel. It is just possible that these propositions are true; if so, a rational man will have no quarrel with them. But if they are true, they ought to be taught everywhere, not only in America. It is a suspicious circumstance that such propositions are never believed outside the particular country which they glorify. Meanwhile the whole machinery of the State, in all the different countries, is turned on to making defenceless children believe absurd propositions the effect of which is to make them willing to die in defence of sinister interests under the impression that they are fighting for truth and right. This is only one of countless ways in which education is designed, not to give true knowledge, but to make the people pliable to the will of their masters. Without an elaborate system of deceit in the elementary schools it would be impossible to preserve the camouflage of democracy."

"It is true that numerous instances are not always necessary to establish a law, provided the essential and relevant circumstances can easily be disentangled. But, in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible. Where our main endeavour is to discover general laws, we regard these as intrinsically more valuable than any of the facts which they inter-connect. In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details. ... But in history the matter is far otherwise... Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws."

"The past alone is truly real: the present is but a painful, struggling birth into the immutable being of what is no longer. Only the dead exist fully. The lives of the living are fragmentary, doubtful, and subject to change; but the lives of the dead are complete, free from the sway of Time, the all but omnipotent lord of the world. Their failures and successes, their hopes and fears, their joys and pains, have become eternal—our efforts cannot now abate one jot of them. Sorrows long buried in the grave, tragedies of which only a fading memory remains, loves immortalized by Death's hallowing touch these have a power, a magic, an untroubled calm, to which no present can attain. ... On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave; in the quiet country of the Past, the march is ended, the tired wanderers rest, and the weeping is hushed."

"A land without ruins is a land without memories—a land without memories is a land without history."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"National history, like every other history worthy of the name and deserving to endure, must be true as regards the facts and reasonable in the interpretation of them. It will be national not in the sense that it will try to suppress or white-wash everything in our country’s past that is disgraceful, but because it will admit them and at the same time point out that there were other and nobler aspects in the stages of our nation’s evolution which offset the former.. . . In this task the historian must be a judge He will not suppress any defect of the national character, but add to his portraiture those higher qualities which, taken together with the former, help to constitute the entire individual."

"[A]n onion falls apart on the chopping block, a history revealed"

"Colonial and imperial history are at the heart of the present African condition. History is not about assigning or sharing blame. Nor it is about narrating the ‘past’, which must be forgotten and forgiven, or simply remembered once a year on remembrance of heroes or independence days. History is about the present. We must understand the present as history, so as to change it for the better; perforce, in the African context where the imperial project is not only historical, but the lived present. Just as we cannot ‘make poverty history’ without understanding the history of poverty, so we cannot chant ‘another world is possible’ without accurately understanding and correctly describing the existing world of five billion slaves and 200 slave masters. How did it come about and how does it continue to exist? Indeed to answer these questions, we must understand history as the philosophy and political economy that underpin the existing world and the vested interests – real social interests of real people – that ensure and defend its existence."

"Many people believe that the crimes of the Nazi regime were so great as to stand outside history. This is a troubling echo of Hitler’s own belief that will triumphs over facts. Others maintain that the crimes of Stalin, though horrible, were justified by the need to create or defend a modern state. This recalls Stalin’s view that history has only one course, which he understood, and which legitimates his policies in retrospect. Without a history built and defended upon an entirely different foundation, we will find that Hitler and Stalin continue to define their own works for us."

"Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht."

"Die Devise der Geschichte überhaupt müßte lauten: Eadem, sed aliter. Hat Einer den Herodot gelesen, so hat er, in philosophicher Ublicht, schon genug Geschichte studirt."

"Es giebt keine Selbstkenntniss als die historische. Niemand weiss was er ist, wer nicht weiss was seine Genossen sind."

"History shows that there are no invincible armies and that there never have been."

"Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed."

"Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance."

"He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history."

"History will be erased in the universal purgatory."

"Narrative is taken to mean the organization of material in a chronologically sequential order and the focussing of the content into a single coherent story, albeit with sub-plots. The two essential ways in which narrative history differs from structural history is that its arrangement is descriptive rather than analytical and that its central focus is on man not circumstances. It therefore deals with the peculiar and the specific, rather than the collective and statistical. Narrative is a mode of historical writing, but it is a mode which also affects and is affected by content and method."

"History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected. Only an impartial analysis of the view in question, an analysis that is not dazzled by the victory or stunned by the defeat of the adherents of the view concerned—could teach us anything regarding the worth of the view and hence regarding the meaning of the historical change."

"Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them."

"“Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. … This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas."

"History is a big word..........History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate."

"Præcipium munus annalium reor, ne virtutes sileantur, utque pravis dictis, factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit."

"For me, history is of use... by being able to steal the ideas of others and leverage them, correct the mental defect that seems to block my ability to learn from others."

"History is written by the victors, but its victims who write the memoirs."

"History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work."

"I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge."

"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

"Compared with the life-span of a human being the time-span of a civilization is so vast that a human observer cannot hope to take the measure of its curve unless he is in a position to view it in a distant perspective; and he can only obtain this perspective vis-a-vis some society that is extinct. He can never stand back sufficiently far from the history of the society in which he himself lives and moves and has his being. In other words, to assert of any living society, at any moment in its life, that it is the consummation of human history is to hazard a guess which is intrinsically unsusceptible of immediate verification. When we find that a majority of the members of all societies at all times make this assertion about their own civilizations, it becomes evident that their guesses have really nothing to do with any objective calculation of probabilities but are pure expressions of the egocentric illusion."

"It is a confusion to present the items of one sort in the idioms of another -- without awareness. For to do this is not just to cross two different sorts; it is to confuse them. It is to mistake, for example, the theory for the fact, the for the , the myth for history, the model for the thing and the metaphor for the face of literal truth."

"We say, “If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.” We must precisely state that what we repeat is not history but our errors under ever-changing material conditions. History does not repeat itself; it cannot. Nothing can. The first law of the universe is everything changes, all the time. Only those who see history as events and not as a process can make this error."

"Authors make errors, history, does not!"

"History is. We cannot make it otherwise."

"History is the unbroken march of struggle to advance humanity."

"Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a place on the historian’s page."

"The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice."

"To ingenious attempts at explaining by the light of reason things which want the light of history to show their meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been due."

"The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews."

"Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."

"All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction."

"L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs."

"Anything but history, for history must be false."

"We are apt to suppose that the facts in any branch of meaning must be in some way open to direct inspection, and that the statements of experts in each branch can be tested by their conformity with them ... The most striking thing about history is that the facts it purports to describe are past facts; and past facts are no longer accessible to direct inspection. We cannot, in a word, test the accuracy of historical statements by simply seeing whether they correspond to a reality which is independently known. How then can we test them? … ... we do so by referring to historical evidence. Although the past is not accessible to direct inspection it has left ample traces of itself in the present, in the shape of documents, buildings, coins, institutions, procedures and so forth."

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

"The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui."

"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."

"History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. it is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility."

"Memory plays tricks that history corrects."

"History does not warehouse well in neatly labeled boxes, for events do not exist in quarantined isolation. They exist on a broad spectrum, and all influence and shape each other. Historical episodes are rarely built on the ground of a single foundation. Most are the product of a tangled web of influences and cascading cause-and-effect relationships within a broader historical narrative."

"We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations [i.e. the East]. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has [an autonomous] genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... [This is] misleading, first, because it turns history into a moral success story, a race in time in which each [Western] runner of the race passes on the torch of liberty to the next relay. History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about how the virtuous [i.e. the West] win out over the bad guys [the East]."

"Those old credulities, to nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock Of History."

"It is always a part of the misfortunes of the vanquished that their portraits are painted and their history written by the victors."

"The greater part of what passes for diplomatic history is little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk."

"If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything."

"Happy is the nation without a history."

"History is a pageant, not a philosophy."

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."

"My heart is feminine, nor can forget— To all, except one image, madly blind; So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole, As vibrates my fond heart to my fix'd soul."

"He raised a mortal to the skies; She drew an angel down."

"Ah, qui jamais auroit pu dire Que ce petit nez retroussé Changerait les lois d'un empire."

"In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others."

"The growth of ideas is an international process, and only those who fully take part in the discussion will be able to exercise a significant influence."

"The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the "general principles which are always the same." In this sense I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments."

"The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally. There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society — as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe."

"No life Can be pure in its purpose or strong in its strife And all life not be purer and stronger thereby."

"No star ever rose or set without influence somewhere."

"If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been changed."

"Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend."

"Example, whether it be good or bad, has a powerful influence."

"God in making man intended by him to reduce all His Works back again to Himself."

"The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green."

"Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation."

"Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another."

"O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self. In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues."

"Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent, All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone."

"A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."

"Nor ease nor peace that heart can know, That like the needle true, Turns at the touch of joy or woe; But turning, trembles too."

"Lay ye down the golden chain From Heaven, and pull at its inferior links Both Goddesses and Gods."

"Spontaneously to God should turn the soul, Like the magnetic needle to the pole; But what were that intrinsic virtue worth, Suppose some fellow, with more zeal than knowledge, Fresh from St. Andrew's College, Should nail the conscious needle to the north?"

"Our life's a flying shadow, God the pole, The needle pointing to Him is our soul."

"So when a great man dies, For years beyond our ken, The light he leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men."

"The very room, coz she was in, Seemed warm f'om floor to ceilin'."

"You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word."

"Even here Thy strong magnetic charms I fed, And pant and tremble like the amorous steel. To lower good, and beauties less divine, Sometimes my erroneous needle does incline; But yet (so strong the sympathy) It turns, and points again to Thee."

"Si possem sanior essem. Sed trahit invitam nova vis; aliudque Cupido, Mens aliud."

"Thus does the Muse herself move men divinely inspired, and through them thus inspired a Chain hangs together of others inspired divinely likewise."

"By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun."

"And the touch'd needle trembles to the pole."

"They are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely."

"Even as the needle that directs the hour, (Touched with the loadstone) by the secret power Of hidden Nature, points upon the pole; Even so the wavering powers of my soul, Touch'd by the virtue of Thy spirit, flee From what is earth, and point alone to Thee."

"Such souls, Whose sudden visitations daze the world, Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind A voice that in the distance far away Wakens the slumbering ages."

"For so the whole round Earth is every way Bound by Gold Chains about the Feet of God."

"I am a part of all that I have met."

"I thank God that if I am gifted with little of the spirit which is said to be able to raise mortals to the skies, I have yet none, as I trust, of that other spirit, which would drag angels down."

"It is very true that I have said that I considered Napoleon's presence in the field equal to forty thousand men in the balance. This is a very loose way of talking; but the idea is a very different one from that of his presence at a battle being equal to a reinforcement of forty thousand men."

"Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives."

"Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace."

"The Bible calls the good man's life a light; and it is the nature of light to flow out spontaneously in all directions, and fill the world unconsciously with its beams. So the Christian shines it would say, not so much because he will, as because he is a luminous object. Not that the active influence of Christians is made of no account in the figure, but only that this symbol of light has its propriety in the fact that their unconscious influence is the chief influence, and has the precedence in its power over the world. The outward endeavors made by good men or bad to sway others, they call their influence; whereas it is, in fact, but a fraction, and, in most cases, but a very small fraction of the good or evil that flows out of their lives."

"If you had the seeds of a pestilence in your body, you would not have a more active contagion than you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence—-an influence, too, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble."

"What we do is transacted on a stage of which all the universe are spectators. What we say is transmitted in echoes that will never cease. What we are is influencing and acting on the rest of mankind. Neutral we cannot be. Living, we act; and dead, we speak; and the whole universe is the mighty company forever looking, forever listening, and all nature the tablets, forever recording the words, the deeds, the thoughts, the passions of mankind."

"No fountain is so small but that heaven may be imaged in its bosom."

"To get good is animal; to do good is human; to be good is Divine. The true use of a man's possessions is to help his work; and the best end of all his work is to show us what he is. The noblest workers of our world bequeath us nothing so great as the image of themselves. Their task, be it ever so glorious, is historical and transient; the majesty of their spirit is essential and eternal."

"Every word, thought, and deed has its influence upon the destiny of man. Every life, well spent or ill spent, bears with it a long train of consequences, extending through generations yet unborn."

"The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the might of the Spirit of God."

"Each language is the sign and power of the soul of the people which naturally speaks it. Each develops therefore its own peculiar spirit, thought-temperament, way of dealing with life and knowledge and experience.... A nation, race or people which loses its language, cannot live its whole life or its real life. And this advantage to the national life is at the same time an advantage to the general life of the human race."

"Incorrigible humanity, therefore, led astray by the giant Nimrod, presumed in its heart to outdo in skill not only nature but the source of its own nature, who is God; and began to build a tower in Sennaar, which afterwards was called Babel (that is, 'confusion'). By this means human beings hoped to climb up to heaven, intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator. ... Only among those who were engaged in a particular activity did their language remain unchanged; so, for in­stance, there was one for all the architects, one for all the carriers of stones, one for all the stone-breakers, and so on for all the different opera­tions. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity."

"Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation."

"LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure."

"It does not seem likely [...] that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language"

"Languages must be taken as organic natural bodies which form themselves according to definite laws."

"The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology."

"The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else."

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other."

"We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged."

"Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups."

"Although excessive screen time is often frowned upon, language experts say that watching shows in a foreign language -- if done with near obsession -- can help someone learn that language. "These stories are hugely common," said Melissa Baese-Berk, associate professor of linguistics and director of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program at the University of Oregon. She points to a New York Times story about professional baseball players from Latin America who learned English by watching "Friends" with Spanish subtitles. But they didn't just watch "Friends"; they watched it over and over again. Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Freddy Galvis told the Times that he had watched every episode of the 10-season show at least five times. Stephen Snyder, dean of language schools at Middlebury College in Vermont, said this story sounds familiar to him. "Our Japanese classes are full of Chinese students and American students who grew up watching Japanese anime, and without having any formal training in Japanese, their comprehension is quite reasonable," he said. "It's a transnational phenomenon, and it makes sense." Baese-Berk says science supports what these young people have experienced. Studies show that it's best to acquire a language through both active and passive learning, and watching shows in a foreign language involves both. Trying to figure out a word that a character in a telenovela is saying would be an example of active learning, and admiring the character's outfit while hearing Spanish in the background would be an example of passive learning, she said."

"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms."

"If you smile at me I will understand, cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language."

"Many languages fly around the world producing sparks when they collide sometimes of hate sometimes of love"

"“Language is my homeland.”"

"In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned."

"Language may be said, in fact, to be the most indispensable instrument of civilization. It is the means whereby the whole life of the past has been handed to us in the present. It is the means whereby we in turn record, preserve, and transmit our science, our industrial methods, our laws, our customs. If human relations were possible at all without a language, they would have to begin anew, without any cultural inheritance, in each generation. Education, the transmitter of the achievements of the mature generation to the one maturing, is dependent on this unique human capacity to make seen marks and heard sounds stand for other things."

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."

"Chant to him the holy song, the incantation sung in its chambers -- the incantation of Nudimmud: "On that day when there is no snake, when there is no scorpion, when there is no hyena, when there is no lion, when there is neither dog nor wolf, when there is thus neither fear nor trembling, man has no rival! At such a time, may the lands of Šubur and Ḫamazi, the many-tongued, and , the great mountain of the me of magnificence, and , the land possessing all that is befitting, and the Martu land, resting in security -- the whole universe, the well-guarded people -- may they all address Enlil together in a single language! ... Enki, the lord of abundance and of steadfast decisions, the wise and knowing lord of the Land, the expert of the gods, chosen for wisdom, the lord of Eridug, shall change the speech in their mouths, as many as he had placed there, and so the speech of mankind is truly one.""

"I am fascinated by how language can take shape through bold typography to inspire or demoralize, unite or divide, raise awareness or spread false beliefs."

"Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”"

"Okay, boys. Tonight's homework. Algebra: x to the nth + y to the nth = z to the nth. Well, you're never gonna use that, are you? Imperialism and the First World War. What was done is done. No point thinking about it now. German, French, Spanish. Ja, ja, oui, oui, si, si. It's nonsense. Everyone speaks English anyway. And if they don't, they ought to."

"Every time that the language question appears, in one mode or another, it signifies that a series of other problems are beginning to impose themselves: the formation and growth of the ruling class, the need to stabilize the most intimate and secure links between that ruling group and the popular national masses, that is, to reorganize cultural hegemony."

"Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself."

"I have no sympathy with the criticism which would treat English as a —a thing crystallised at an arbitrarily selected stage of its existence, and bidden to forget that it has a past and deny that it has a future. Purism, whether in or , almost always means ignorance. Language was made before grammar, not grammar before language. As for the people who make it their business to insist on the utmost possible impoverishment of our English vocabulary, they seem to me to ignore the lessons of history, science, and common-sense."

"Prophets hold a key to the lock in a language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them. This is not a mechanical universe."

"One of the results of the rapid depersonalization of our age is a crisis of speech, profanation of language. We have trifled with the name of God, we have taken the name and the word of the Holy in vain. Language has been reduced to labels, talk has become double-talk. We are in the process of losing faith in the reality of words. Yet prayer can happen only when words reverberate with power and inner life, when uttered as an earnest, as a promise. On the other hand, there is a high degree of obsolescence in the traditional language of the theology of prayer. Renewal of prayer calls for a renewal of language, of cleansing the words, of revival of meanings. The strength of faith is in silence, and in words that hibernate and wait. Uttered faith must come out as a surplus of silence, as the fruit of lived faith, of enduring intimacy. Theological education must deepen privacy, strive for daily renewal of innerness, cultivate ingredients of religious existence, reverence and responsibility."

"The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world."

"The people from Prague and other Czechs should be whipped who speak half Czech and half German (...) And who could enumerate how the Czech language has already been corrupted, so that the true Czech hears they speak, but he does not understand them. And from that arises envy, anger, conflict, strife and Czech humiliation."

"Language is the picture and counterpart of thought."

"A language survives through natural social use, not through staged symbols."

"I first said "No; that is the white man's God, and the white man's religion; and that God would not have anything to do with the Indians." …I thought that God could only understand English... I then met with Peter Jones, who was converted a few months before me, and, to my surprise, I hear him return thanks, at meal, in Ojibway. This was quite enough for me. I now saw that God could understand me in my Ojibway, and therefor went far into the woods and prayed, in the Ojibway tongue."

"Language is the dress of thought."

"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language."

"There was a silence; then, clearing his throat, "Once upon a time," the Director began, "while our Ford was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.""

"Learning a language stretches a long way to help create trust, to strengthen our ability to communicate and to understand another people. It also signals willingness to give up centrality."

"When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world."

"We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s[emantic] r[eactions] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us."

"Uniformism had created the demand that all people with an identical or similar literary language should draw together in common political units. Yet literary languages are usually artificial creations, coined by certain masters at a given moment in history and accepted by the upper classes. The English-speaking reader should bear in mind that the literary languages of the European continent are not of aristocratic or royal mark. "The King's English" has no equivalent either in the Germanic countries nor in the Mediterranean area. It usually is the upper bourgeoisie who speaks the literary, i.e., the artificially standardized language, with the greatest perfection, while there is often a "low-class" dialectical strain in the idiom of the nobility and even royalty. The Empress Maria Theresa spoke broadest Viennese, and this local dialect continued to be used by the Emperors of Austria until 1848. The late King of Saxony repeatedly used the Saxonian dialect, and argot expressions are far more widespread in aristocratic circles around Paris and Budapest than in the haute bourgeoisie, which always prided itself on a strongly standardized language, which is nothing else but an intranational Esperanto (understood and spoken everywhere inside the nation)."

"Words alike make the destiny of empires and of individuals. Ambition, love, hate, interest, vanity, have words for their engines, and need none more powerful. Language is a fifth element — the one by which all the others are swayed."

"… and French and Italian were, it must be owned, somewhat unnecessary to one who considered her own language an unnecessary fatigue."

"Henry Drummond: Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damned few words that anybody understands!"

"Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation."

"For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us."

"How else can I say it? I don't speak no other languages."

"Men learned to speak in order to understand one another. Cultural languages have lost the ability to help men to advance beyond the most rudimentary level and attain understanding. It seems that the time has come to learn to be silent once again."

"Here it is fitting to remark that the study of the spontaneous growth of languages is of the utmost importance to those who would logically remodel them."

"Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of this healthy process of change and growth."

"It is language and religion that make a people, but religion is even a more powerful agent than language."

"‘We cannot tell as yet what the language is. It may be the production of nature, a work of human art, or a divine gift….If it be a production of nature, it is her last and crowning production, which she reserved for man alone. If it be a work of human art, it would seem to lift the human artist almost to the level of a divine creator. If it be the gift of God, it is God’s greatest gift; for through it God spake to man and man speaks to God in worship, prayer and meditation’."

"No jobs, no people. No people, no . No Gaeltacht, no language."

"Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species."

"Literature has something to do with language. There's probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what's on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you'll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren't a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of school-teachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage."

"“Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”"

"“Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words.”"

"“Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation.”"

"It seems to me that the notion of 'a language' should not be regarded as scientifically reconstructable at all. We can say in very broad terms that a human language is a characteristic way of structuring expressions shared by a speech community; but that is extremely vague, and has to remain so. The vagueness is ineliminable, and unproblematic. Human languages are no more scientifically definable than human cultures, ethnic groups, or cities. The most we can say about what it means to say of a person that they speak Japanese is that the person knows, at least to some approximation, how to structure linguistic expressions in the Japanese way (with object before verb, and postpositions, and so on). But in scientific terms there is no such object as 'Japanese'."

"Ebbinghaus: Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time."

"I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media."

"…language is this medium that we hand back and forth between us in all human relationships all the time, it doesn't really have a privileged place. It's this coinage in which we keep trying to get a hold of each other or make ourselves clear."

"Experience is always larger than language."

"The politician manufactures a language - a vocabulary and a rhetoric - which, if you accept it as wholly adequate, leads inevitably to the answers he wants and to the actions he wants. But the prior question is whether the language is adequate to the facts. And as the poet is concerned with making language do new work and finding out the implications of language , his answer is always : no ."

"While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome"

"…basically, language is an inadequate and limited instrument. No matter what language a writer speaks, she always hopes that it will be universal, that it will transcend the particular ethnic barriers that language creates."

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."

"It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture; closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas... The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves."

"A clever Toronto lawyer was deep into a technical argument before the Supreme Court. His position was dependent upon a close reading of the legal text and turned on the letter of the law. Suddenly the chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, leaned forward and asked the counsel if his argument also worked in French. After all, the law is the law in both languages and a loophole in one tends to evaporate in the other. Only an argument of substance stands up. The lawyer had no idea what to reply."

"Dick Grayson: Oh, heck! What's the use of learning French anyway?"

"He has strangled His language in his tears."

"Thou whoreson Zed! thou unnecessary letter!"

"You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!"

"Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body."

"There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture."

"Language is its own music."

"Oh Lord God, deliver us from this prison, almost as it were, of paper, pen and ink, and of a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language."

"One can learn to speak a new language, but [learning] to embrace the weight of its meaning from its people, within Pacific contexts and mannerism, can never be replaced."

"Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts."

"The story of man’s infatuation with his language is an unending one. In a remote village of Africa, a wise Dogon man used to say “to be naked is to be speechless.” Power, as unveiled by numerous contemporary writings, has always inscribed itself in language. Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion."

"Knowledge belongs to the one who succeeds in mastering a language."

"Language also reveals its power through an insignificant slip of the pen, for no matter how one tries to subject it to control and reduce it to “pure” instrumentality, it always succeeds in giving an inkling of its irreducible governing status."

"Anyone who invents a language,” he said, “finds that it requires a suitable habitation and a history in which it can develop. A real language is never invented, of course. It is a natural thing. It is wrong to call the language you grow up speaking your native language. It is not. It is your first learnt language. It is a by-product of the total make-up of the animal."

"Language is a human construct. The more vibrant and fast-moving society is, the more the language changes. That can be a wonderful thing. In fact, one of my favorite books to read in off-hours is H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, written by this genius when he was otherwise censored for his views in wartime. It’s a marvelous chronicling of the evolution of American usage, published in 1919, but oddly pertinent even today, applicable to the dwindling number of people who can still form coherent sentences. When it comes to vocabulary, there are two schools of thought broadly speaking: prescriptivist and descriptivist. The prescriptivist view is that words have embedded meanings that you can trace from other languages and should be used as intended. The descriptivist approach sees language as more a living experience, a tool of utility to make communication possible, in which case anything goes."

"That well known distinction between knowing that and knowing how fits the learning of a language....That is, we must distinguish between knowing how to speak or listen to words and knowing that about them. Learning a language is primarily the former."

"Verbing weirds language."

"We live in a time of acute bitterness and acrimony, where people’s first (and second and third) impulse is to brutalize, insult, embarrass and demean those who hold different views. The purpose of language, as they see it, isn’t to clarify or enlighten or reason together. It is to inflict the maximum pain possible on other human beings."

"Language itself inevitably introduced an element of permanence into the world. For, although speech itself is transitory, the conventionalized sound symbols of language transcended time. ...To obtain a greater degree of permanence the time symbols of oral speech had to be converted into the space symbols of written speech. ...The crucial stage in the evolution of writing occurred when ideographs became phonograms..."

"Speech is the best show a man puts on."

"There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other — by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought."

"Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later."

"Jede Zeit sagt, daß derzeit die Sprache so gefährdet und von Zersetzung bedroht sei wie nie zuvor. In unserer Zeit aber ist die Sprache tatsächlich so gefährdet und von Zersetzung bedroht wie nie zuvor."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

"For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either. p. 25"

"An entire mythology is stored within our language."

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."

"But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English […] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. […] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness."

"Well languag'd Danyel."

"Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company."

"And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in th' yet unformed Occident May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?"

"Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows."

"Language is fossil poetry."

"“A language, like a species, when extinct, never… reappears.”"

"And don't confound the language of the nation With long-tailed words in osity and ation."

"Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas."

"L'accent du pays où l'on est né demeure dans l'esprit et dans le cœur comme dans le langage."

"Writ in the climate of heaven, in the language spoken by angels."

"La grammaire, qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois, Et les fait, la main haute, obéir à ses lois."

"Une louange en grec est d'une merveilleuse efficace à la tête d'un livre."

"L'accent est l'âme du discours, il lui donne le sentiment et la vérité."

"No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached"

"Syllables govern the world."

"Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam."

"Don Chaucer, well of English undefyled On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled."

""We worked with a guy called Dr. Stuart Smith from UCLA and he’s an Egyptologist He put all this stuff on tape for us and it’s kind of the closest we can come to what we think the actual language sounded like. It’s like ancient Latin. When we speak Latin now we think it’s what it sounded like, but we’re not really sure. The problem with a lot of this Egyptian stuff is words like ‘look out’ become like 10 lines. Steve would go, ‘No, no, no. Lose the first four words. Say that word and then say the last word.’ So basically, I’d end up making the stuff up."

"Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language."

"The English language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever."

"From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk."

"Oft on the dappled turf at ease I sit, and play with similes, Loose type of things through all degrees."

"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws."

"A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god."

"What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees."

"For it is most true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast."

"Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection."

"Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society."

"I’ve inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don’t behave themselves because they are nice. That’s the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don’t they will be punished. All this is known. It isn’t even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause."

"Building up societies with “dead souls” is no great achievement."

"The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth."

"The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism."

"I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance."

"A people is but the attempt of many To rise to the completer life of one— And those who live as models for the mass Are singly of more value than they all."

"But now being lifted into high society, And having pick'd up several odds and ends without any danger of a riot, he Might for long lying make himself amends; And singing as he sung in his warm youth, Agree to a short armistice with truth."

"What times! What manners!"

"The only living socities are those which are animated by inequality and injustice."

"It is the retention by twentieth-century, men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village."

"Those families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand."

"In human society the warmth is mainly at the bottom."

"The rout is Folly's circle, which she draws With magic wand. So potent is the spell, That none decoy'd into that fatal ring, Unless by Heaven's peculiar grace, escape. There we grow early gray, but never wise."

"It's not sex and drug advice these kids need, so much as help in acquiring a world view, in motivating them to take responsibility and enabling them to build proper relationships."

"Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported."

"The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”"

"The dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished."

"The virtues of society are the vices of the saint."

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."

"Every man is like the company he is wont to keep."

"In the affluent society, no sharp distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries."

"For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong ]Liyabona Kakaza], Social Problems, Chapter IX. Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 724–25."

"The noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure."

"I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London."

"A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world … aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure."

"We have really lost in our society the sense of the sacredness of life."

"I will only suggest that greater biological knowledge may, before long, alter the whole structure of society. Those who think that the life of the future will be like that of the present, only more so, are likely, I think, to be wrong."

"I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself."

"Le sage quelquefois évite le monde de peur d'être ennuyè."

"He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society."

"-- social life is fill’d With doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, When the imagination is dethroned, Is turned to weariness."

"Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life."

"Full quote: Truly, society is like a large piece of frozen water ; there are the rough places to be shunned, the very slippery ones all ready for a fall, and the holes which seem made expressly to drown you. All that can be done is to glide lightly over them. Skating well is the great art of social life."

"I see clearly that society is as much a science as astronomy; and, also, that, like poetry, one must be born with a genius for it."

"The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next."

"A system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife."

"We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world."

"A society made up of the individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic."

"When society requires to be rebuilt, there is no use in attempting to rebuild it on the old plan."

"This is the essence of a good society: that people are able to feel goodness in themselves and each other as much as possible; that even when things are difficult or life is painful, people have the support of others; that the ways we get things done are also the ways we carve out spaces to fully see and appreciate each other. And have fun."

"There are two ways of considering society. According to some, the development of human associations is not subject to providential, unchangeable laws. Rather, these associations, having originally been organized in a purely artificial manner by primeval legislators, can later be modified or remade by other legislators, in step with the progress of social science. In this system the government plays a preeminent role, because it is upon it, the custodian of the principle of authority, that the daily task of modifying and remaking society devolves. According to others, on the contrary, society is a purely natural fact. Like the earth on which it stands, society moves in accordance with general, preexisting laws. In this system, there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as social science; there is only economic science, which studies the natural organism of society and shows how this organism functions."

"Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them. Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation. This natural organization is called society. The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished."

"Old Lady T-sh-nd [Townshend] formerly observed that the human race might be divided into three separate classes—men, women and H-v-eys [Herveys]."

"La Société est l'union des hommes, et non pas les hommes."

"This new rage for rhyming badly, Which late hath seized all ranks and classes, Down to that new estate 'the masses.'"

"What will Mrs. Grundy say?"

"The absence of hope can rot a society from within."

"Intense suffering may be a private, internal phenomenon, often hidden from the gaze or awareness of others, but it is the most viscerally overwhelming experience there is, pleading desperately for relief. There is nothing else that has greater urgency than preventing or relieving intense suffering – of human beings and, indeed, of any sentient beings capable of suffering. It is the single most important goal of a compassionate society."

"Our genetically enriched descendants may regard existence without "dukkha" - the abolition of suffering - as the ethical foundation of any civilised society."

"I dread to think of a society devoid of love, compassion and humanity."

"Heav'n forming each on other to depend, A master, or a servant, or a friend, Bids each on other for assistance call, Till one man's weakness grows the strength of all."

"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."

"The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them."

"Society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still more by making his strength insufficient for his needs."

"There are two kinds of dependence: dependence on things, which is the work of nature; and dependence on men, which is the work of society."

"In human society man is the chief tool of man."

"Money is the source of all the false ideas of society."

"Society must be studied in the individual and the individual in society."

"Men are depraved and perverted by society."

"Society is so general and so mixed there is no place left for retirement, and even in the home we live in public."

"Society is not created by the crowd."

"Sociale animal est."

"Society is no comfort To one not sociable."

"Whilst I was big in clamour came there in a man, Who, having seen me in my worst estate, Shunn'd my abhorr'd society."

"To make society The sweeter welcome, we will keep ourself Till supper-time alone."

"Men lived like fishes; the great ones devoured the small."

"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."

"As the French say, there are three sexes,—men, women, and clergymen."

"Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanille of society."

"I don't want to waste my time; become another casualty of society. I'll never fall in line; become another victim of your conformity and back down."

"Society can imprison one's happiness"

"It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob."

"As long as men are men, a poor society cannot be too poor to find a right order of life, nor a rich society too rich to have need to seek it."

"They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations."

"Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society."

"Society therefore is as ancient as the world."

"In the past, women were supposed to be pretty and men successful. Nowadays, everyone has to be able to do everything, and the pressure to satisfy that goal, along with the insecurity it brings, has doubled. Expectations rise while birth rates fall. Women have become a more horrific version of men, readily expressing their displeasure over lack of sexual compliance. Men have become insecure and have fled to the Internet. Both are approaching a state of narcissistic lunacy, and solidarity is something that seems attainable only among friends."

"I suppose Society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy."

"Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself."

"At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city."

"Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life."

"There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead."

"Society became my glittering bride, And airy hopes my children."

"Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase "social forces". Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics."

"[Society] is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

"We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges."

"The truth is that a vast restructuring of our society is needed if remedies are to become available to the average person. Without that restructuring the good will that holds society together will be slowly dissipated. It is that sense of futility which permeates the present series of protests and dissents. Where there is a persistent sense of futility, there is violence; and that is where we are today."

"The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow—by the tilt of the social landscape."

"The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society."

"Ought I not to have been more careful to win the good opinion of others, more determined to conquer their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation—to force the esteem of others—seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation."

"I hold it as certain, that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself."

"And reputation bleeds in ev'ry word."

"Get yourself the reputation for being an early riser, and you can sleep until four o'clock in the afternoon. People will still say, "There he goes, the early riser.""

"A lost good name is ne'er retriev'd."

"They please, are pleased, they give to get esteem, Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem."

"I do not myself believe much in the comforting theory that posterity is always in the right, and that the reputation neglected to-day will necessarily be established at the end of some vista of to-morrows; it is true that in the long run—the very long run, the run of many centuries—a general tribute is accorded to those worthy reputations which have survived to get it; but we can never know how many have literally perished of neglect."

"How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!"

"A man may be reputed an able man this year, and yet be a beggar the next: it is a misfortune that happens to many men, and his former reputation will signify nothing."

"The tree is known by his fruit."

"The blaze of a reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket."

"The love of esteem is the life and soul of society; it unites us to one another : I want your approbation, you stand in need of mine. By forsaking the converse of men, we forsake the virtues necessary for society; for when one is alone, one is apt to grow negligent; the world forces you to have a guard over yourself."

"Would you be esteemed? live with persons that are estimable."

"And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak."

"Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us."

"Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?"

"In those days, when people were not wise like you young people, they were content to listen to a tree or a rock in simple openness, just as long as it spoke the truth, but to you, perhaps, it makes a difference who is speaking and where he comes from."

"In various talk th' instructive hours they past, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At every word a reputation dies."

"The art of being able to make a good use of moderate abilities wins esteem and often confers more reputation than real merit."

"I have offended reputation, A most unnoble swerving."

"Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving."

"Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial."

"Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name, Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed."

"The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation; that away, Men are but gilded loam or painted clay."

"Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land Wherein thou liest in reputation sick."

"I see my reputation is at stake: My fame is shewdly gor'd."

"'Tis better to be vile than vile esteem'd, When not to be receives reproach of being;"

"Fame's a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns."

"Honesta fama melior pecunia est."

"The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection."

"See that your character is right, and in the long run your reputation will be right."

"It is a maxim with me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself."

"Negligere quid de se quisque sentiat, non solum arrogantis est, sed etiam omnino dissoluti."

"No book was ever written down by any but itself."

"Nemo me lacrymis decoret, nec funera fletu. Faxit cur? Volito vivu' per ora virum."

"Denn ein wanderndes Mädchen ist immer von schwankendem Rufe."

"Ich hulte nichts von dem, der von sich denkt Wie ihn das Volk vielleicht erheben möchte."

"That man is thought a dangerous knave, Or zealot plotting crime, Who for advancement of his kind Is wiser than his time."

"Guard yourself against accusations, even if they are false; for the multitude are ignorant of the truth and look only to reputation. In all things resolve to act as though the whole world would see what you do; for even if you conceal your deeds for the moment, later you will be found out. But most of all will you have the respect of men, if you are seen to avoid doing things which you would blame others for doing."

"Reputation is but a synonyme of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters."

"Reputations, like beavers and cloaks, shall last some people twice the time of others."

"How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!"

"To be pointed out with the finger."

"Das Aergste weiss die Welt von mir, und ich Kann sagen, ich bin besser als mein Ruf."

"Convey a libel in a frown, And wink a reputation down!"

""Thou shalt not get found out" is not one of God's commandments, and no man can be saved by trying to keep it."

"The two most precious things this side the grave are our reputation and our life."

"The wise man must not be ordered but must order, and he must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him."

"Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins ... remain addicted to such things as running errands and messages, such as for kings, ministers, nobles, Brahmins, householders and young men who say, "Go here, go there! Take this there, bring that from there," the ascetic Gotama refrains from such errand-running."

"You moralistic dog—admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling."

"The fear of some divine and supreme powers keeps men in obedience."

"Don't give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you — enslave you — who regiment your lives — tell you what to do — what to think or what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!"

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"For we will subject ourselves not to some ordinary harm, but to real danger, if we rashly hand ourselves over to the desires of those who rush headlong into strife and faction and so estrange us from what is good for us."

"When Diogenes of Sinope was sold as a slave, he endured it most nobly. For on a voyage to Aegina he was captured by pirates under the command of Scirpalus, conveyed to Crete and exposed for sale. When the auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, "In ruling men." Thereupon he pointed to a certain Corinthian with a fine purple border to his robe, the man named Xeniades above-mentioned, and said, "Sell me to this man; he needs a master.""

"The life doth prove the precept, who obey shall happy be, Who will not serve the sovereign, be hanged on fatal tree."

"She stirs confusion and chaos against those who are disobedient to her, speeding carnage and inciting the devastating flood, clothed in terrifying radiance."

"In dealing with relationships, not only man-to-man, but also State-to-State and race-to-race, it is necessary to be able to conceive again of that obedience which does not humiliate but exalts, that command or leadership which commits one to superiority and a precise responsibility."

"From the fight against the authority of the Church, State and family which characterize the last centuries, we have come back full circle to a new obedience; but this obedience is not one to autocratic persons, but to the organization. The ‘organization man’ is not aware that he obeys; he believes that he only conforms with what is rational and practical."

"Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will of judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself; hence the word obey can be applied only in a metaphorical sense and with a meaning which is fundamentally different from the one in the case of “heteronomous obedience.”"

"Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers."

"It isn't right to be obedient only when things go well; it is much harder to be a good, obedient soldier when things go badly and times are hard. Obedience and faith at such time is a virtue."

"Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves."

"Τί δὲ καὶ ἀφ’ ἑαυτῶν οὐ κρίνετε τὸ δίκαιον;"

"The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves."

"We must obey God rather than men."

"Obedience is the key to every door."

"I find the doing of the will of God, leaves me no time for disputing about His plans."

"Even if all the nations that live under the rule of the king obey him, and have chosen to obey his commandments, every one of them abandoning the religion of their ancestors, I and my sons and my brothers will continue to live by the covenant of our ancestors. Far be it from us to desert the law and the ordinances. We will not obey the king’s words by turning aside from our religion."

"Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others. Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time. It has been reliably established that from 1933-45 millions of innocent persons were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders. Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority. Facts of recent history and observation in daily life suggest that for many persons obedience may be a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed, a prepotent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct. C. P. Snow (1961) points to its importance when he writes:"

"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

"Son of Heav'n and Earth, Attend! That thou art happy, owe to God; That thou continuest such, owe to thyself, That is, to thy obedience; therein stand."

"Ascend, I follow thee, safe guide, the path Thou lead'st me, and to the hand of heav'n submit."

"All that Jehovah has spoken we are willing to do, and we will be obedient."

"You were bought with a price; stop becoming slaves of men."

"We do speak a wisdom among the mature, but not a wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing."

"Εἰ ἀπεθάνετε σὺν Χριστῷ ἀπὸ τῶν στοιχείων τοῦ κόσμου, τί ὡς ζῶντες ἐν κόσμῳ δογματίζεσθε;"

"Πειθαρχεῖν δεῖ Θεῷ μᾶλλον ἢ ἀνθρώποις."

"I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey."

"There are few things as nauseating as pure obedience."

"Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd."

"Let them obey that know not how to rule."

"It fits thee not to ask the reason why, Because we bid it."

"Your wish is my command, Master."

". . . The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton."

"The poor man’s son ... devotes himself for ever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness. To obtain the conveniencies which these afford, he submits in the first year, nay in the first month of his application, to more fatigue of body, and more uneasiness of mind, than he could have suffered through the whole of his life from the want of them. ... He makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power."

"You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards, So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod."

"One so small Who knowing nothing knows but to obey."

"Unless the gods deceive my mind, That man is forging fetters for himself."

"Do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven."

"The order of authority derives from God, as the Apostle says [in Romans 13:1-7]. For this reason, the duty of obedience is, for the Christian, a consequence of this derivation of authority from God, and ceases when that ceases. But, as we have already said, authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it."

"With regard to the abuse of authority, this also may come about in two ways. First, when what is ordered by an authority is opposed to the object for which that authority was constituted (if, for example, some sinful action is commanded or one which is contrary to virtue, when it is precisely for the protection and fostering of virtue that authority is instituted). In such a case, not only is there no obligation to obey the authority, but one is obliged to disobey it, as did the holy martyrs who suffered death rather than obey the impious commands of tyrants. Secondly, when those who bear such authority command things which exceed the competence of such authority; as, for example, when a master demands payment from a servant which the latter is not bound to make, and other similar cases. In this instance the subject is free to obey or disobey."

"Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are ... the most serious obstacles to reform."

"Il est bien malaisé (puisqu’il faut enfin m’expliquer) d’ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu’ils révèrent."

"The powerful, if they carry oppression beyond a certain point, necessarily end by making themselves adored by their slaves. For the thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. ... It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation."

"Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it."

"That ... is the road to the obedience of compulsion. But there is a shorter way to a nobler goal, the obedience of the will. When the interests of mankind are at stake, they will obey with joy the man whom they believe to be wiser than themselves. You may prove this on all sides: you may see how the sick man will beg the doctor to tell him what he ought to do, how a whole ship's company will listen to the pilot."

"Obedience is the mother of success, the wife of safety."

"Qui modeste paret, videtur qui aliquando imperet dignus esse."

"'Tis the same, with common natures, Use 'em kindly, they rebel, But, be rough as nutmeg graters, And the rogues obey you well."

"All arts his own, the hungry Greekling counts; And bid him mount the skies, the skies he mounts."

"All sciences a fasting Monsieur knows; And bid him go to hell—to hell he goes."

"No nice extreme a true Italian knows; But bid him go to hell, to hell he goes."

"Though a god I have learned to obey the times."

"Through obedience learn to command."

"Rursus prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur; sontibus parent boni, ius est in armis, opprimit leges timor."

"Obedience decks the Christian most."

"The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it."

"The sound convert takes a whole Christ, and takes Him for all intents and purposes, without exceptions, without limitations, without reserves. He is willing to have Christ, upon His own terms, upon any terms. He is willing to bear the dominion of Christ as well as have deliverance by Christ. He saith with Paul, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?""

"To be a Christian is to obey Christ no matter how you feel."

"O God, the strength of all those who put their trust in Thee; mercifully accept our prayer; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without Thee, grant us the help of Thy grace, that in keeping Thy commandments we may please Thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord."

"Every man obeys Christ as he prizes Christ, and no otherwise."

"The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: — they acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced in His will in all things."

""Arise, take up thy bed and walk." You are on your bed now. You put yourself there by your own sin. You have kept yourself there by your own choice. Every sinner is a sinner because he chooses to be; and you are no exception. Jesus commands you to repent and trust Him and follow Him. The moment you are willing to obey, He gives you strength to obey."

"Worship is easier than obedience. Men are ever readier to serve the priest than to obey the prophet."

"I believe that the fewer the laws in a home the better; but there is one law which should be as plainly understood as the shining of the sun is visible at noonday, and that is, implicit and instantaneous obedience from the child to the parent, not only for the peace of the home, but for the highest good of the child."

"Poor, sad Humanity Through all the dust and heat Turns back with bleeding feet, By the weary road it came, Unto the simple thought By the Great Master taught, And that remaineth still, Not he that repeateth the name, But he that doeth the will!"

"True obedience to God is the obedience of faith and good works; that is, he is truly obedient to God who trusts Him, and does what He commands."

"O that we could take that simple view of things, as to feel that the one thing which lies before us is to please God! What gain is it to please the world, to please the great, nay, even to please those whom we love, compared with this? What gain is it to be applauded, admired, courted, followed,—compared with this one aim of "not being disobedient to the heavenly vision?""

"Let the ground of all thy religious actions be obedience; examine not why it is commanded, but observe it because it is commanded. True obedience neither procrastinates nor questions."

"This is the secret of Christ's kingship— "He became obedient — wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him." And this is the secret of all obedience and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will."

""Sir," said the Duke of Wellington to an officer of engineers, who urged the impossibility of executing the directions he had received, "I did not ask your opinion, I gave you my orders, and I expect them to be obeyed." Such should be the obedience of every follower of Jesus."

"Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now."

"Utopianism is manifest in countless historical examples of those that have dared to challenge the status quo and assert that things can — and indeed, must — change. Take Martin Luther King’s dream of a world free of racial segregation for example, or the strivings of the suffragettes for gender equality... Now, our relationship with the natural world is humanity’s defining challenge — and utopian ideas have shifted to meet it. “Ecotopian” aspirations are already in full view in community networks attempting to create more conscious ways of living such as the Transition Network, social movements such as Extinction Rebellion, and bold policy proposals such as the USA’s “Green New Deal.” What’s more, many of the ideas put forth by these projects were long since imagined in prominent ecotopian literary works."

"In shattering the perceived rigidity of the present, utopianism paves the way for change. Perfect worlds may not be realizable or even desirable, but that doesn’t mean we should shy away from imagining and striving for a better future. Societies without extreme inequality and environmental degradation are surely within the bounds of possibility. Whether in the form of a creative novel, a social movement, or a political proposal, dreaming can help us get there."

"There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived."

"The ground-root folly of this piteous philantropy is thinking to distribute indivisibles, and make equality in things incommensurable: forged under such delusions, all Utopias are castles in the air or counsels of despair."

"Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, she retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, she swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. For what might utopia be useful? It is useful for this: to keep walking."

"Utopias and other models of government, based on the public good, may be inconceivable because of the disordered human passions which, under the wrong governments, seek to highlight the poorly conceived or selfish interest of the community. But even though we find it impossible, they are ridiculous to sinful people whose sense of self-destruction prevents them from believing."

"It is solemnly said that this is a transition period; but the whole history of humanity has been one continual transition period. The great and delightful thing about human existence is that it has been engaged from the beginning of time in one everlasting crisis. Humanity went to bed every night expecting to wake up and find itself divine. The whole of history is the vigil of a festival. This is, I think, the essential error which gives that strange air of unreality, even of a kind of spectral horror, to all the Utopias which are now written about the ultimate condition of men."

"[W]e have crossed a great divide, between what we used to do in all of previous human history and what we do now. Utopia, it is true, this is not. I imagine Bellamy would be at once impressed and disappointed. The economic historian helps explain why. ...With our increasing wealth, what used to be necessities become matters of little concern ...conveniences turn into necessities. Luxuries turn into conveniences. And we humans envision and then create new luxuries. ...He saw humanity on a hedonic treadmill: "...the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is a triumph of material wants over humanity." ...[T]his hedonic treadmill is one powerful reason why, even when all went very well, we only slouched rather than galloped toward utopia."

"Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity."

"How can there ever be a utopia? There is no right way to live, which we’ve simply failed to stumble upon. There is no set of rules, there is no system, there is no formula. Why should there be? Short of the existence of a creator—and a perverse one, at that—why should there be some blueprint for perfection, just waiting to be discovered?"

"The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe."

"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . . . Humanity is in "final exam" as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe."

"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian."

"I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin."

"The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison."

"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost."

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution—then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."

"I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical."

"I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them. … I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples."

"The first attempt to run trawler fishing off Iceland was made in 1899 by an Englishman who had settled in Hafnarfjörður. The name of the ship was Utopia, which was prophetic because the enterprise came to nothing and was abandoned that same autumn."

"Critics of utopianism have argued that utopian ends inevitably are used to legitimize violent means, whether against the scapegoated opponents of a utopian project or against innocent bystanders who must pay a price for the greater good of society."

"Critics contend that utopianism privileges uniformity over diversity, consensus over dissent, and end-of-history stasis over ongoing change. Is it possible in a utopian society to permit expressions of diversity that might lead to conflict? Can anything essentially new happen after utopia has been achieved. Or do genuinely new ideals inherently threaten utopias? Once built, must they become conservative in some sense?"

"Marxist dreams legitimized Soviet gulags, and religious visions have justify crusades and jihads. This explains why the term “utopia” so often is used pejoratively and visionaries often are dismissed as mad or sick. The pursuit of a perfect society can justify and even demand the use of any means possible, including the violent purging of all who resist that glorious end. In short, redemptive visions can inspire redemptive violence."

"The spirit of rebellion is a spirit of desperation-a desperate rejection of whatever exists, a desperate aspiration toward some kind of utopia. ...It is governed by a blind momentum... and its so-called leaders are... its captives, and ultimately its victims. ...The so-called "betrayal" is... the necessary conclusion... [I]ts impossible intentions are unrealizable... the end result is... a regime which pretends to embody these intentions and... enforces such false pretentions by terror. A revolution... is a... practical exercise in political philosophy. ...It requires an attentive prudence, a careful calculation of means and ends, a spirit of sobriety... [A] successful revolution cannot be governed by the spirit of the mob. ...[I]f ...revolution is not to degenerate into a rebellion, mob actions must be marginal... [O]nly a self-disciplined people can... undertake... a revolution. ...[A] successful revolution is best accomplished by a people who do not really want it at all, but find themselves reluctantly making it."

"If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until "justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.""

"Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise."

"When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build."

"In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity. The seedbed is waiting. All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. Well, why doesn't it?"

"We are not utopians, we do not indulge in "dreams" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination; these anarchist dreams ... serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and "managers." ... The united workers themselves ... will hire their own technicians, managers and bookkeepers, and pay them all, as, indeed, every state official, ordinary workmen's wages."

"We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NUTOPIA. Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA. NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic. All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the country. As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people."

"In Utopia all greed for money was entirely removed with the use of money. What a mass of troubles was then cut away! What a crop of crimes was then pulled up by the roots! Who does not know that fraud, theft, rapine, quarrels, disorders, brawls, seditions, murders, treasons, poisonings, which are avenged rather than restrained by daily executions, die out with the destruction of money? Who does not know that fear, anxiety, worries, toils, and sleepless nights will also perish at the same time as money? What is more, poverty, which alone money seemed to make poor, forthwith would itself dwindle and disappear if money were entirely done away with everywhere."

"To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed us unavoidably. Nor is it Plato’s licensing of books will do this, which necessarily pulls along with it so many other kinds of licensing, as will make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate; but those unwritten, or at least unconstraining laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture, which Plato there mentions, as the bonds and ligaments of the Commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every written statute; these they be which will bear chief sway in such matters as these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and remissness, for certain are the bane of a Commonwealth, but here the great art lies to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work."

"If the "liberal" mentality is prone to take flights into Utopia, the "reactionary" is guilty of sensing plots in every human enterprise involving hope, enthusiasm, and will to change. The correct attitude of this conflict must stem... from a rediscovery of philosophy which has enough courage to free itself of the historical-ideological-utopian perspective. ...this philosophy must re-emphasize man versus the collective body (with its envisaged collectivized mind), freedom versus the mechanization of inner and social life, common sense versus faith in science."

"Utopian thinking is not merely futile, it is also profoundly immoral since it contradicts the structure of man's thought and action in its applicability to the world. Since it misleads man, it is an ultimately irresponsible doctrine. The philosopher... denies that good may be so increased as to obscure evil, that man may be substantially changed, and that society may take upon itself the qualities denied to individual man and thus secure happiness for the latter. ..."If we cannot produce virtuous individuals," the utopian says, "let us produce a virtuous society; instead of individual virtues, we shall have social virtues." ...The orientation is to build a social body, a mankind that thinks and acts as one, that is both persuaded and organized in view of becoming "perfect." ...Hence the striking intellectual failure of the idealogue, fruit of his profound immorality. ...his is the sin of pride, the sin that requires the greatest stupidity. It is ironical that he who is committed to a rational-scientific view, should be the real simple-minded one, the poor in the soul. Will it be forgiven him?"

"I believe in some sort of strange fashion that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that wouldn’t have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in one line and the 7th Calvary in the other. We have not got an awful lot of mid ground between Utopia and Apocalypse, and if somehow our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons any more, and that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we’ve got to do something else to do with our time than they will have the right to throw up their arms, let down their streamers and let forth a resounding cheer."

"There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others."

"Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably."

"One persistent strand in utopian thinking, as we have often mentioned, is the feeling that there is some set of principles obvious enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give unambiguous guidance in particular situations, clear enough so that all will realize its dictates. and complete enough to cover all problems which actually arise. Since I do not assume that there are such principles, I do not presume that the political realm will whither away. The messiness of the details of a political apparatus and the details of how it is to be controlled and limited do not fit easily into one's hopes for a sleek, simple utopian scheme."

"Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision? The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual right with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we please, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more? Or less?"

"Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness."

"Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?"

"Unless the vertebrate central nervous system is genetically recoded, there will be traumas and malaise in utopia - any utopia - too."

"... a permanent distillation of the MDMA magic, if feasible, offers an extraordinary if unorthodox vision of one post-Darwinian paradise to come."

"Most dictionaries associate utopia with ideal commonwealths, which they characterize as an empirical realization of an ideal life in an ideal society. Utopias, especially social utopias, are associated with the idea of social justice."

"In general, utopia has a positive meaning as a unit that represents an ideal human society, a normative social ideal (regulative idea) of perfect quality. Utopias approach the moral, social ideal of particular societies o global vision of justice. Every society necessarily presents certain notions of social good, which only proves the existence of utopianism as a universal idea for all cultures that have certain written or unwritten rules."

"The world has become too dangerous for anything less than utopias."

"Utopia is work that issues from pain: it is what we do not have that we crave."

"In both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, utopias were advanced, compromised by reality, and then implemented as mass murder: in autumn 1932 by Stalin, and autumn 1941 by Hitler. Stalin’s utopia was to collectivize the Soviet Union in nine to twelve weeks; Hitler’s was to conquer the Soviet Union in the same span of time. Each of these seems, in retrospect, to be horrendously impractical. Yet each of them was implemented, under the cover of a big lie, even after failure was obvious. Dead human beings provided retrospective arguments for the rectitude of policy. Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory."

"No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy."

"Well, you know, Star Trek and the Starship Enterprise was supposed to be a metaphor for Starship Earth. It was supposed to be an idealized representation of what our society should be. In our society, we have a lot of minorities. Asians, African-Americans, women getting on the upward mobility escalator. They're making progress going up, whether it's in the professional world or the business world, or in other various careers. But the problem seems to be that think called the glass ceiling. They make it up to a certain point and then it stops. I kept lobbying to the powers that be at Paramount saying to them, "if Starfleet is to represent that ideal, you just can't keep giving us advances in rank." By that time I was a Commander. The movie before that I was a Lieutenant Commander, but I was still there at the helm punching those same buttons. I said to them, "it's very important that if we are supposed to be that kind of bright, eminently capable people...professionals....we have to get that advancement. We have to be able to show that this idealized society truly works. It's very important than, that we see one of the characters moving up and becoming a captain. Of course, my character being Sulu, I lobbied most vigorously for him. Finally after 25 long years of lobbying, we were able to reach that idealized representation of Starfleet. The glass ceiling doesn't exist with Starfleet. He was a captain then."

"Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind."

"The New Earth Is No Utopia... All utopian visions have this in common: the mental projection of a future time when all will be well, we will be saved, there will be peace and harmony and the end of our problems. There have been many such utopian visions. Some ended in disappointment, others in disaster. At the core of all utopian visions lies one of the main structural dysfunctions of the old consciousness: looking to the future for salvation. The only existence the future actually has is as a thought form in your mind, so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation. You are trapped in form, and that is ego. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” writes the biblical prophet. The foundation for a new earth is a new heaven – the awakened consciousness. The earth – external reality – is only its outer reflection. The arising of a new heaven and by implication a new earth are not future events that are going to make us free... only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening. Awakening as a future event has no meaning because awakening is the realization of Presence. So the new heaven, the awakened consciousness, is not a future state to be achieved. A new heaven and a new earth are arising... at this moment..."

"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."

"... the asymmetry in ease of realization [of suffering vs. happiness] suggests that it is more cost-effective (for a wide variety of value systems) to work to avoid dystopian outcomes than to create utopian ones."

"I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream. … Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia. That's what I want for me."

"Utopias are invented to be realized, and as long as there is no demand for an improvement of living conditions, changing things is impossible."

"Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past."

"The bourgeois … is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be."

"In India, the bourgeois, in Japan, the Samurai; in this single difference is comprised the whole contrasted histories of the two nations during the nineteenth century."

"They know their profession, but they ignore anything unconnected with their profession. So, to protect their self-esteem, they call everything into question, criticize right and left; seem skeptical but are actually gullible, and drown their minds in interminable discussions. Almost all of them adopt convenient social, literary, or political prejudices so as to dispense with having to form an opinion of their own, just as they place their conscience in the shelter of common law, or of the commercial court. Having left home early in order to become remarkable men, they become mediocre, and crawl along the heights of society. Accordingly, their faces present us with this sour pallor; these false complexions, these dull, lined eyes, these talkative and sensual mouths where the observer recognizes the symptoms of the degeneration of thought and its turning round and round in the dull circle of specialization that kills the generative faculties of the brain, the gift of seeing the big picture, of generalizing and deducing."

"Civilization is by its nature bourgeois in the deepest spiritual sense of the word. 'Bourgeois' is synonymous precisely with the civilized kingdom of this world and the civilized will to organized power and enjoyment of life. The spirit of civilization is that of the middle classes; it is attached and clings to corrupt and transitory things; and it fears eternity. To be a bourgeois is therefore to be a slave of matter and an enemy of eternity. The perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality."

"On bourgeois ground … change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se."

"Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life."

"In America we have only the bourgeoisie, and the love of the heroic is one of the few counterpoises available to us. In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons. Students have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself."

"[Rock and the intellectual Left] must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois’ need to feel that he is not bourgeois."

"Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms."

"Americans … do not naturally apply the term “bourgeois” to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. … The term “middle class” does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist—all good."

"Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off."

"The bourgeois is selfish, but without the purity and simplicity of natural selfishness. … His faithfulness to others and his obedience to law are founded on expectation of gain. … Thus he corrupts morality, the essence of which is to exist for its own sake. The bourgeois satisfies neither extreme, nature or morality. The moral demand is merely an abstract ideal if it asks for what nature cannot give. Brutish selfishness would be preferable to sham morality."

"The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle’s formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human."

"The European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically—or perhaps realistically—confined, by aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby."

"One of the most prevalent ideological mantras of Western capitalism is that the market should rule. But as the latest health and economic crises demonstrate, capitalists soon forget their worship of the market when times get tough. They scream for government money, and plenty of it. It turns out that “the market” is fine when it comes to whipping workers to accept lower wages, but when it comes to lower profits, the market can go hang."

"The last thing any capitalist wants is “free competition”, because that might squeeze their profits. Just look at how the supermarkets have destroyed small shops or how any new industry that emerges is soon dominated by three or four companies globally."

"Capitalists preach “the market” for the working class – stand on your own two feet, don’t rely on the government – but themselves sponge off the public big time. Just look at the billions in subsidies and tax concessions the fossil fuel companies, huge enterprises for the most part, extract from state and federal governments in Australia. The vehicle manufacturers raked in hundreds of millions a year from the for decades until deciding it wasn’t enough and went overseas. This is why big companies and industry groups hire armies of former politicians to lobby on their behalf in the offices of premiers and prime ministers – there’s money in government coffers and they want it. And while the capitalists talk about “the market” setting wages for workers, in reality, they don’t really allow the market to do the job. They use the whole apparatus of state repression, the industrial tribunals, the police, the courts to suppress workers’ rights to organise to pursue their demands. But when a crisis hits all the bullshit about the market is thrown to the winds. And that is just what we are seeing now. Faced with the collapse of the capitalist economy, for the second time in a dozen years, with massive bankruptcies on the table and the stock market plunging by more than 30 percent and more to come, fervent advocates of the free market are now embracing government intervention to save their skins."

"The code of the Bourgeoisie … is different from the Feudal code of the past, of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry; it is different from the Democratic code of the future—of brotherhood and of equality; it is the code of the Commercial age and its distinctive watchword is—property. The Respectability of today is the respectability of property. There is nothing so respectable as being well-off."

"Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype—the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy."

"When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself."

"I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted."

"The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie."

"Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital."

"The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way."

"Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government."

"Everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers."

"Bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day."

"Some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow."

"Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it."

""Brother," "sister," "comrade" are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie because in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my scheming."

"La haine du Bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu."

"The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth."

"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity."

"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

"The political bourgeoisie is about to leave the stage of history. In its place advance the oppressed producers of the head and hand, the forces of Labor (Arbeitertum), to being their historical mission."

"Hypocrisy is the characteristic feature of the dying bourgeois epoch."

"The bourgeois ... considered the philosophes to be his true guides, which did not prevent him from taking good care not to adopt their teachings once he realized they might be damaging to the interests of his class. ... He seemed quite disposed to make his peace with the Church, now that he was sure of being sufficiently emancipated to be able to live his life as he chose. To go farther, he feared, would be to act contrary to the interests of his class, for disbelief, by spreading among the people, might eventually endanger the principles of the social order which the bourgeoisie needed to establish its domination."

"The Steppenwolf stood entirely outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor social ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed from the common run of men by the prerogative of talents that had something of genius in them. Deliberately, he looked down upon the ordinary man and was proud that he was not one. Nevertheless his life in many aspects was thoroughly ordinary. … He was secretly and persistently attracted to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest air of order and comfort. It pleased him to set himself outside it, with his little vices and extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius, but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the bourgeoisie had ceased to exist. He was not at ease with violent and exceptional persons or with criminals and outlaws, and he took up his abode always among the middle classes, with whose habits and standards and atmosphere he stood in a constant relation, even though it might be one of contrast and revolt."

"What we call bourgeois, when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. .... He strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule."

"Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry."

"With the spread of the bourgeois commodity economy the dark horizon of myth is illuminated by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose icy rays the seeds of the new barbarism are germinating."

"Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility."

"“Most men live in order to make a living; when they have that, they live in order to make a good living; when they have that, they die. …"

"If there were no politics, then all the bourgeois would have to fill him would be his inner life, i.e., nothing."

"It is not a mere coincidence that almost all prominent Socialists and Communists were of middle-class descent. The basic problem of middle-class life is security — in the national as well as in the personal sense. The two classes which have the greatest inner affinities and likeness, the working class and the middle class, both live in the cities and the vast majorities of both classes are employees and not free men. [...] He who had the greatest security was the most admired of all. The worker shares this admiration in all bourgeois civilizations and thus he is not immune against the terrible, bourgeois promise of bolshevism: "Ye shall all be state employees! Ye shall all get insurance and pensions!""

"It is not what he feels and aspires that moves him primarily; it is what the folks about him will think of him."

"The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they're so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can't hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy."

"While this bourgeois order found its rich—and even affirmative—representation in art and literature, … it remained an order which was over-shadowed, broken, refuted by another dimension which was irreconcilably antagonistic to the order of business, indicting it and denying it. And in the literature, this other dimension is represented not by the religious, spiritual, moral heroes (who often sustain the established order) but rather by such disruptive characters as the artist. the prostitute, the adulteress, the great criminal and outcast, the warrior, the rebel-poet, the devil, the fool—those who don't earn a living, at least not in an orderly and normal way. To be sure, these characters have not disappeared from the literature of advanced industrial society, but they … perform a function very different from and even contrary to that of their cultural predecessors. They are no longer images of another way of life but rather freaks or types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order."

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value."

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid ers."

"The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian. … The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise."

"It’s the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, which wants to make all Puritan litanies, all moral sermons, and petty bourgeois respectability sound out of tune."

"Middle class, middle man, incapable of great virtue or great vice: and there would be nothing wrong with that, if only he would be willing to remain as such; but, when his child-like or feminine tendency to camouflage pushes him to dream of grandeur, honours, and thus riches, which he cannot achieve honestly with his own "second-rate" powers, then the average man compensates with cunning, schemes, and mischief; he kicks out ethics, and becomes a bourgeois."

"The bourgeois is the average man who does not accept to remain such, and who, lacking the strength sufficient for the conquest of essential values—those of the spirit—opts for material ones, for appearances."

"The economic strangulation of today, that scientific, cold, rectangular, clean, clearcut, seamless, implacable, wise, common, constant, convenient-as-a-virtue strangulation; that strangulation where there is nothing to be said and where the strangled one is so obviously in the wrong, did not exist. … The people of those days would have blushed for our best tone of today, which is the bourgeois tone. And today, everyone is bourgeois."

"Towards this fine honor of a trade converged all the finest, all the most noble sentiments—dignity, pride. Never ask anything of anyone, they used to say. … In those days a workman did not know what it was to solicit. It is the bourgeoisie who, turning the workmen into bourgeois, have taught them to solicit."

"In classical cultures, an ascended class had to justify itself before those now below in the social structure. But the culture revolution of our time has eliminated this need for class- as well as self-justification. Nevertheless, those below still seek to emulate the ascendant social class, without being convinced of its superiority."

"Most of the people who write about underdevelopment and who are read in the continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are spokesmen for the capitalist or bourgeois world. They seek to justify capitalist exploitation both inside and outside their own countries. One of the things which they do to confuse the issue is to place all underdeveloped countries in one camp and all developed countries in another camp irrespective of different social systems; so that the terms capitalist and socialist never enter the discussion. Instead, one is faced with a simple division between the industrialized nations and those that are not industrialized. It is true that both the United States and the Soviet Union are industrialized and it is true that when one looks at the statistics, countries such as France, Norway, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania are much closer together than any one of them is to an African country. But it is absolutely necessary to determine whether the standard of living in a given industrialized country is a product of its own internal resources or whether it stems from exploiting other countries. The United States has a small proportion of the world’s population and exploitable natural wealth but it enjoys a huge percentage of the wealth which comes from exploiting the labor and natural resources of the whole world."

"The one version of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what labor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who does research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvious that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the idealist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bourgeois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and “freedom” in general."

"It is held that one fulfils his whole duty when he is industrious in his business or vocation, observing also the decencies of domestic, civil, and religious life. But activity of this kind stirs only the surface of our being, leaving what is most divine to starve; and when it is made the one important thing, men lose sense for what is high and holy, and become commonplace, mechanical, and hard. Science is valuable for them as a means to comfort and wealth; morality, as an aid to success; religion, as an agent of social order. In their eyes those who devote themselves to ideal aims and ends are as foolish as the alchemists, since the only real world is that of business and politics, or of business simply, since politics is business."

"The conversation of the true bourgeois about men and life, which is no more than a collection of ugly details, brings on a profound attack of spleen when I am obliged out of propriety to listen to it for any length of time."

"The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite."

"The bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance, and now labor betrays it by embracing a scheme of things which sees profit only, not duty and honor, in work."

"The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority."

"Early British economists held that the application of the principle of Division of labor was the basis of manufacture.... Charles Babbage, believed ... in [an] "Economy of Machinery and Manufacture." It appears, however, that another principle is the basic one in the rise of industry. It is the transference of skill. The transference of skill from the inventor or designer to the power-driven mechanism brought about the industrial revolution from handicraft to manufacture. It will be necessary to refer to this principle frequently throughout this report, in showing the meaning and position of management in industry."

"The first application of this principle must have been made in a very early stage of society; for it must soon have been apparent that more comforts and conveniences could be acquired by one man restricting his occupation to the art of making bows, another to that of building houses, a third boats, and so on. This Division of labor into trades was not, however, the result of an opinion that the general riches of the community would be increased by such an arrangement: but it must have arisen from the circumstances, of each individual so employed discovering that he himself could thus make a greater profit of his labour than by pursuing more varied occupations."

"Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps, will some day find its Dante. In this third social circle, a sort of Parisian belly, in which the interests of the town are digested, and where they are condensed into the form known as /business/, there moves and agitates, as by some acrid and bitter intestinal process, the crowd of lawyers, doctors, notaries, councillors, business men, bankers, big merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be found even more causes of moral and physical destruction than elsewhere... Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments..."

"Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals. ... The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being."

"You can’t treat values like workers, hiring and firing them at will and assigning each a place in an imposed division of labor. The taste for freedom and pleasure can’t be compartmentalized."

"The unremitting division of labour resulted in admirable levels of productivity. The company’s success appeared to bear out the principles of efficiency laid down at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorized that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. … But however great the economic advantages of segmenting the elements of an afternoon’s work into a range of forty-year-long careers, there was reason to wonder about the unintended side effects of doing so. In particular, one felt tempted to ask … how meaningful the lives might feel as a result."

"As yet no aesthetic standards have been introduced. Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organisation of labour."

"In Amazon societies... no division of labor based on sex seems to have existed... Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been...ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression."

"Solis etenim in uno convenientibus actu eadem loquela remansit: puta cunctis architectoribus una, cunctis saxa volventibus una, cunctis ea parantibus una; et sic de singulis operantibus accidit. Quot quot autem exercitii varietates tendebant ad opus, tot tot ydiomatibus tunc genus humanum disiungitur."

"As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity."

"Surely just about everybody has faced a moral dilemma and secretly wished, "If only somebody — somebody I trusted — could just tell me what to do!" Wouldn't this be morally inauthentic? Aren't we responsible for making our own moral decisions? Yes, but the virtues of "do it yourself" moral reasoning have their limits, and if you decide, after conscientious consideration, that your moral decision is to delegate further moral decisions in your life to a trusted expert, then you have made your own moral decision. You have decided to take advantage of the division of labor that civilization makes possible and get the help of expert specialists."

"The Methods of Industrial Management. — A committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers made an extensive canvass in the fall of 1912 to determine what were the new elements in modern management as well as what the committee designated as the regulative principles of industrial management. The committee confirmed Adam Smith's statement made in 1776 in his Wealth of Nations, in which he held that the application of the principle of division of labor was the basis of manufacture..."

"There is nobody who is not surprised of the small price of pins; but we shall be even more surprised, when we know how many different operations, most of them very delicate, are mandatory to make a good pin. We are going to go through these operations in a few words to stimulate the curiosity to know their detail; this enumeration will supply as many articles which will make the division of this work. ... The first operation is to have brass go through the drawing plate to calibrate it."

"At this point, an urgent question arises: … Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being, one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism? Briefly, is the Division of labor, at the same time that it is a law of nature, also a moral rule of human conduct; and, if it has this latter character, why and in what degree?"

"Nowadays, the phenomenon (of division of labor) has developed so generally it is obvious to all. We need have no further illusions about the tendencies of modern industry; it advances steadily towards powerful machines, towards great concentrations of forces and capital, and consequently to the extreme Division of labor. Occupations are infinitely separated and specialized, not only inside the factories, but each product is itself a specialty dependent upon others. Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill still hoped that agriculture, at least, would be an exception to the rule, and they saw it as the last resort of small-scale industry. Although one must be careful not to generalize unduly in such matters, nevertheless it is hard to deny today that the principal branches of the agricultural industry are steadily being drawn into the general movement. Finally, business itself is ingeniously following and reflecting in all its shadings the infinite diversity of industrial enterprises; and, while this evolution is realizing itself with unpremeditated spontaneity, the economists, examining its causes and appreciating its results, far from condemning or opposing it, uphold it as necessary. They see in it the supreme law of human societies and the condition of their progress."

"In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. A simple example: a dam has been built somewhere, and it bursts. Who is responsible for that? Geologists worked out. They examined the terrain. Engineers drew up the construction plans. Workmen constructed it. And the politicians decided that the dam had to be in that spot. Who is responsible? No one. There is never anyone responsible. Anywhere. In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. But no one is free either. Everyone has his own, specific task. And that's all he has to do. Just consider, for example, that atrocious excuse… It was one of the most horrible things I have ever heard. The director of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was asked at the Nuremburg trials trials, “But didn’t you find it horrible? All those corpses?” He replied, “What could I do? I couldn’t process all those corpses. The capacity of the ovens was too small. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about these people. I was too busy with the technical problem of my ovens.” That is the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task and isn’t interested in anything else."

"We think of the division of labor as being outdated, but in fact it has reemerged. In the early ‘80s, a mother was 43 times more likely than the father to leave the workplace for family responsibilities; more recently, a mom is 135 times more likely to leave the workplace for family responsibilities."

"The love of wisdom in its wholeness requires exploration of the sources of the things we take for granted, including the thinking that has sorted out all the various disciplines, making demarcations between fields as well as envisioning what is to be done within them."

"The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing."

"This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other. Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society."

"Both the control of territory and the political domination of one state over another have profound consequences for international economic relations. However... market power or economic power has itself become a principal means by which states seek to organize and manipulate the international division of labor to their own advantage."

"We might better read the entire life cycle as a division of labor, with larvae as feeding and growing stages, and the adult as a short-lived reproductive machine. In this sense, we could well view the adult fly's day as the larva's clever and transient device for making a new generation of truly fundamental feeders."

"It is appropriate at the outset of this discussion to consider the reasons for and the effect of the division of work. It is sufficient for our purpose to note the following factors."

"It is now proper to proceed a step further, and to enumerate the principal circumstances, from which it may be inferred, that manufacturing establishments not only occasion a positive augmentation of the Produce and Revenue of the Society, but that they contribute essentially to rendering them greater than they could possibly be, without such establishments. These circumstances are:"

"The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labour but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labour on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type"

"I've always doubted that the socialists had a leg to stand on intellectually. They have improved their argument somehow, but once you begin to understand that prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have, the whole idea that you can bring about the same order based on the division of labor by simple direction falls to the ground..."

"The dwarf standing on the shoulders of the giant can indeed see further than his supporter, especially if he puts on spectacles; but to such a lofty survey is wanted the elevated feeling, the giant-heart, to which we cannot lay claim."

"There is hardly any need to point out how infinitely more complex present-day production methods are than those of the eighteenth century. Smith, for all his disclaimers, was sufficiently impressed with a small factory of ten people to write about it; what would he have thought of one employing ten thousand! But the great gift of the division of labor is not its complexity—indeed it simplifies most toil. Its advantage lies in its capacity to increase what Smith calls “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” That universal opulence of the eighteenth century looks like a grim existence from our modern vantage point. But if we view the matter in its historical perspective, if we compare the lot of the workingman in eighteenth-century England with that of his predecessor a century or two before, it is clear that, mean as his existence was, it constituted a considerable advance."

"Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so."

"It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash."

"A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person… but falls instead into the same moral category as an animal – of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest). On the other hand, there are members of the human species who are capable of understanding the [value of the division of labor] but...who knowingly act wrongly… [B]esides having to be tamed or even physically defeated [they] must also be punished… to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully teach them a lesson for the future."

"Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such."

"The more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois Division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul."

"With the clean separation between science and poetry the Division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, be synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it."

"When every individual person labours a-part, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employ’d in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any particular art; and as his force and success are not at all times equal, the least failure in either of these particulars must be attended with inevitable ruin and misery. Society provides a remedy for these three inconveniences. By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability en creases: And by mutual succor we are less expos’d to fortune and accidents. ’Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous."

"Tolstoy seems to have felt somehow that social evolution was standing in his way. He did not like the division of labor. He hated all forms of commerce and trade. The State was an abomination in his eyes. He wanted it abolished and with it, indeed, all of modern society based upon machine industry. With Rousseau, he would go back to the primitive state."

"In the time of Jesus almost everybody worked in small shops or on the land and then sold or bartered their own products in the towns. There were no vast industrial centers, no great factories, no steam power or electricity. Everyone knew his neighbor by name. There was no highly developed division of labor, nor were there great extremes of wealth and poverty. Such economic conditions are ideal—or at least as nearly ideal as they can ever be—for the spread of Christian communism. And so they are still in many parts of Russia."

"The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers."

"Rationalism is the philosophy of bourgeois political economy. It is materialist and not idealist in so far as it combats superstition, seeks to expand the productive forces and increase the sum total of goods. But there is no such thing as a classless materialism. Rationalism conceives this expansion as a division of labor between the passive masses and the active elite. Thereby it reinstates idealism. Because it does not and cannot doubt that harmonious progress is inevitable by this path, the essence of rationalism is uncritical or vulgar materialism, and uncritical or vulgar idealism. In the springtime of capitalism this rationalistic division of labor was the basis of a common attempt of individual men associated in a natural environment to achieve control over nature. Today this division of labor is the control in social production of the administrative elite over the masses. Rationalism has reached its end in the complete divorce and absolute disharmony between manual and intellectual labor, between the socialized proletariat and the monster of centralized capital. The specific political ideology developed by rationalism was democracy – equality of opportunity for all men to rise to the top, and hence equality in all spheres outside of production, before the law, at the polls and in the market."

"Today, from end to end of the world, men know that democracy is bankrupt. What is to take its place they do not know. The alternative seems to be planned economy and one-party state. This is the philosophical question. But the philosophy of planned economy and one-party state is distinguishable from that of the bourgeoisie only by its more complete rationalism. The labor bureaucracy in power or out of it sees the solution to the crisis of production in scientific progress, greater output. It consciously seeks to plan and organize the division of labor as the means to further accumulation of capital. In ideology it is ready to expropriate those representatives of private property who stand in the way of this complete rationalization. But didn’t this bureaucracy develop out of the working class? It did and it could only have developed out of the working class. It is a product of the modern mass movement, created by the centralization of capital, and holds its position only because of this movement. At the same time it cannot conceive the necessity for abolishing the division of labor in production, the only solution to the crisis in production. By a remorseless logic, therefore, representation of the proletariat turns into its opposite, administration over the proletariat. The end of bourgeois rationalism is this crisis of the revolution and counter-revolution in production."

"The power of the individual human being is not sufficient for him to obtain (the food) he needs, and does not provide him with as much as he requires to live. Even if we assume an absolute minimum of food...that amount of food could be obtained only after much preparation...Thus, he cannot do without a combination of many powers from among his fellow beings, if he is to obtain food for himself and for them. Through cooperation, the needs of a number of persons, many times greater than their own number, can be satisfied."

"The underlying principle of specialization is division of labor; but the term division of labor has become associated with the individual worker, whereas specialization is, in general, far reaching in its effects, and influences industrial enterprises of all kinds."

"The term division of labor has, from long usage, become associated in the public mind with manual processes. But productive labor is, in general, both manual and mental and just as there may be division of manual labor so there may be division of mental labor or division of thought. Modern productive methods tend constantly to separate mental labor from manual labor and then to subdivide each into smaller and smaller parts. The subdivision of manual labor is greatly furthered, as has been seen, by the extended use of tools. Subdivision of mental labor on the other hand is hastened by an increase in the amount of knowledge and mental development necessary to successfully perform the work in hand. Thus the mental labor of designing machinery is performed largely apart from the actual production; and this mental labor has become very closely specialized as the scientific basis of engineering has grown. This process of subdivision is greatly hastened in both manual and mental operations by increased quantity since this, of itself, enables the manager to avail himself of the inherent advantages of division of labor already discussed."

"But if one will wholly apply himself to the making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another provides Food, a third builds Huts, a fourth makes Garments, and a fifth Utensils, they not only become useful to one another, but the Callings and Employments themselves will in the same Number of Years receive much greater Improvements, than if all had been promiscuously followed by every one of the Five."

"The societal Division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition. If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group."

"There is a phase of this matter which is both interesting and serious. The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange with the city dweller for the other necessities of life. This division of labor is the basis of modern civilization. At the present time it is threatened with breakdown. The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer. Raw materials and fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out. The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So the sale of his farm produce for money which he cannot use seems to him an unprofitable transaction. He, therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing. He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food, however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization. Meanwhile, people in the cities are short of food and fuel, and in some places approaching the starvation levels. So the governments are forced to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world."

"The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the manifestation of life as the alienation of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species-being."

"As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital."

"The division of distinctive social roles and tasks, based upon both inherited and socially acquired individual differences, is called social differentiation."

"Social differentiation is a universal characteristic of human societies. Early human societies survived and became dominant among animal species because of their superior social organization — that is, their more elaborate division of labor and consequent close coordination of activities."

"The division of labour is a consequence of the previous accumulation of capital... As the accumulation of capital must have preceded the division of labour, so its subsequent division can only be extended as capital is more and more accumulated. Accumulation and division act and react on each other. The quantity of raw materials which the same number of people can work up increases in a great proportion, as labour comes to be more and more subdivided; and acccording as the operations of each workman are reduced to a greater degree of identity and simplicity, he has, as already explained, a greater chance of discovering machines and processes for facilitating and abridging his labour. The quantity of industry, therefore, not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock or capital which sets it in motion; but, in consequence of this increase, the division of labour becomes extended, new and more powerful implements and machines are invented, and the same quantity of labour is thus made to produce an infinitely greater quantity of commodities"

"A second, related assumption of modern progress-philosophy is that intellectual production functions in essentially the same way as economic production: the progress of both results from “teamwork,” from the practice of the Division of labor or specialization within a group. And just as the essential precondition of the economic Division of labor is exchange, so the precondition of intellectual specialization is the efficient exchange of knowledge—through publication."

"In the employment of labour and machinery, it is often found that the effects can be increased by skilful distribution, by separating all those operations which have any tendency to impede one another, and by bringing together all those operations which can be made in any way to aid one another. As men in general cannot perform many different operations with the same quickness and dexterity with which they can by practice learn to perform a few, it is always an advantage to limit as much as possible the number of operations imposed upon each. For dividing labour, and distributing the powers of men and machinery, to the greatest advantage, it is in most cases necessary to operate upon a large scale; in other words, to produce the commodities in greater masses. It is this advantage which gives existence to the great manufactories; a few of which, placed in the most convenient situations, frequently supply not one country, but many countries, with as much as they desire of the commodity produced."

"People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict."

"Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them.& Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain Division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation.This natural organization is called society.The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs.& The Division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished."

"The division of labor, which has brought such perfection in mechanical industries, is altogether fatal when applied to productions of the mind. All work of the mind is superior in proportion as the mind that produces it is universal."

"Tolstoy ... believed that property claims were based on robbery and maintained by violence. More radical than second-century radical Christians and than most monks, he turned even against the subdivision of labor in economic society. It seemed to him to be the means by which privileged persons such as artists, intellectuals, and their kind, absorbed the labor of others, justifying themselves by the belief that they were beings of a higher order than workingmen, or that their contribution to society was so great that it compensated for their claims."

"Those who tirelessly use the modem cry of battle and sacrifice “division of labour! Fall into line!” are for once to be told clearly and bluntly: if you want to further science as quickly as possible you will destroy it as quickly as possible; as the hen will perish if artificially forced to lay eggs too quickly. Granted, science has been furthered surprisingly quickly in the last decades: but just look at the scholars, the exhausted hens. They truly are no “harmonious” natures; they can only cackle more than ever because they lay eggs more often: of course, the eggs have become ever smaller (even if the books ever bigger)."

"Faced with a world of “modern ideas” which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of “greatness,” on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity."

"Life is diseased, thanks to this dehumanised piece of clockwork and mechanism, thanks to the “impersonality” of the workman, and the false economy of the “division of labour.” The object, which is culture, is lost sight of: modern scientific activity as a means thereto simply produces barbarism."

"As a result of this continuous improvement of productivity through the division of labor and technical advancement, one hour's labor today is worth about 25 times more than it was in the mid-19th century. ... Growth and productivity alone are capable of raising real wages in the long run."

"International specialization and Division of labor requires institutions and organizations to safeguard property rights across international boundaries so that capital markets as well as other kinds of exchange can take place with credible commitment on the part of the players."

"Well then, how will our state supply these needs? It will need a farmer, a builder, and a weaver, and also, I think, a shoemaker and one or two others to provide for our bodily needs. So that the minimum state would consist of four or five men."

"The lifeblood of our economy, indeed the whole world's economy, is based on money. Without a currency that can be trusted, the entire structure of economics, the division of labor itself, falls apart."

"When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts."

"The United States has never actually wanted one true spy service, on the model of England’s MI6. Instead, it has tried to create a first-rate spy community. That community reflects the character of our culture: it’s a crazy-quilt of checks and balances, division of labor, specialization, decentralization, friendship with free nations, civilian control of the military, and a distrust of secrecy dating to the Salem witch trials."

"The new attitude of the critic toward the artist has been rationalized for me by a leading European art historian who is also an influential critic of current art. It is based on a theory of division of labor in making art history. The historian, he contends, knows art history and, in fact, creates it; the artist knows only how to do things..."

"Lately people are saying that the reason for the success of manufacturing is the Division of labor. We say "Division of labor," but this term is incorrect. In our society it is not labor that is divided, but human beings — these are divided into human particles, broken into small pieces, ground into dust: in a factory one man makes only one minute portion of an article, because that tiny fragment of reason which he retains is insufficient to make a complete pin or a complete nail, and is exhausted in the task of pointing the pin or heading the nail. It is true that it is good and desirable to make as many pins daily as possible, but if we realized the material with which we finish them, we would realize how unprofitable it all is. It is unprofitable because we polish them with the dust of the human soul."

"The celebrated Adam Smith was the first to point out the immense increase of production, and the superior perfection of products referable to this division of labour."

"If every family produced all that it consumed, society could keep going although no exchange of any sort took place; without being fundamental, exchange is indispensable in our advanced state of society. The division of labour is a skilful deployment of man’s powers; it increases society’s production-its power and its pleasures-but it curtails, reduces the ability of every person taken individually. Production cannot take place without exchange"

"Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of the state necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too. ... With this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities."

"The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical capacity for work. Those which arise from the condition of society consist of the capacity to divide up labour and to distribute different jobs amongst different People ... and the power to exchange mutual services and the products which constitute these means. The motive which impels a man to give his services to another is self -interest- he requires a reward for the services rendered. The right of exclusive private property is indispensable to the establishment of exchange amongst men... Exchange and division of labour reciprocally condition each other."

"Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzième. They are persons who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of services."

"There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom “purity” is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments."

"The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor."

"To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth, part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations."

"Each individual becomes more expert in his own peculiar branch, more work is done upon the whole, and the quantity of science is considerably increased by it. It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people."

"This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."

"There should be some division of labor between us... The Soviet Union cannot... have the same influence [in Asia] as China is in a position to do... By the same token, China cannot have the same influence as the Soviet Union has in Europe. So, for the interests of the international revolution... you may take more responsibility in working in the East... and we will take more responsibility in the West... In a word, this is our unshirkable duty."

"The last of Smith’s regrettable failures is one for which he is overwhelmingly famous – the Division of labor. How can it be that the famous opening chapters of his book, and the pin factory he gave immortality, can be considered a failure? Are they not cited as often as any passages in all economics? Indeed, over the generations they are. The failure is different: almost no one used or now uses theory of Division of labor, for the excellent reason that there is scarcely such a theory. … there is no standard, operable theory to describe what Smith argued to be the mainspring of economic progress. Smith gave the Division of labor an immensely convincing presentation – it seems to me as persuasive a case for the power of specialization today as it appeared to Smith. Yet there is no evidence, so far as I know, of any serious advance in theory of the subject since his time, and specialization is not an integral part of the modern theory of production, which may well be an explanation for the fact that the modern theory of economies of scale is little more than a set of alternative possibilities."

"Condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. Therefore he must become a master in it too, be able to perform it as a totality. He who in a pin-factory only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, works, as it were, mechanically, like a machine; he remains half-trained, does not become a master: his labor cannot satisfy him, it can only fatigue him. His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another’s hands and is used (exploited) by this other. For this laborer in another’s service there is no enjoyment of a cultivated mind, at most crude amusements: culture, you see, is barred against him."

"Marx followed the vision of a world society which presupposes and establishes forever the complete victory of the town over the country, of the mobile over the deeply rooted, of the spirit of the Occident over the spirit of the Orient; the members of the world society which is no longer a political society are free and equal, and are so in the last analysis because all specialization, all division of labor, has given way to the full development of everyone."

"The life that I aspire to live"

"It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself."

"Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor."

"Division of labor is a justification for sloth."

"The proposition that markets drive economic efficiency is central to much of economics. Adam Smith illustrated that the “invisible hand” of the market drives efficient allocation of resources in a system of division of labor. Friedrich Hayek illustrated the central importance of the price system as an information processing mechanism more powerful than any centrally planned system could ever be. Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu illustrated that complete and perfect markets deliver a Pareto-efficient equilibrium, in which no one person can be made better off without making someone else worse off. And the development of the efficient- market and rational- expectations hypotheses suggested that financial markets are in fact efficient, and that the conditions required for efficiency and for rational and stable equilibria apply even in contracts between the present and the future, which financial markets provide."

"The movement of people and ideas is ... more than useful; it is sacrosanct. It forms part of the process by which the whole human race becomes both one and diverse, and makes itself more godlike, by affirming in the individual as well as in the species, its preeminence over the particular social and cultural worlds that it builds and inhabits. Both the movement of people and the movement of ideas can unsettle and frighten us, driving us back into ourselves. They can also inspire us to reimagine and to remake our interests, our ideals, and even our identities, by beginning to detach them from the settings with which we habitually associate them. Each of them is therefore an invitation to open ourselves to the new, in a world in which every man and woman has a better chance to become the original that he imagines himself to be."

"I believe in the virtues of professional division of labor, however, and I am troubled, therefore, when economists adopt the role and the tactics of the prophet or the politician, especially when there is any ground for suspicion that what is involved is false prophecy."

"[A world-system is] a system that is a world and which can be, most often has been, located in an area less than the entire globe. World-systems analysis argues that the units of social reality within which we operate, whose rules constrain us, are for the most part such world-systems (other than the now extinct, small mini-systems that once existed on the earth). World-system analysis argues that there have been thus far only two varieties of world-systems: world-economies and world empires. A world-empire (examples, the Roman Empire, Han China) are large bureaucratic structures with a single political center and an axial division of labor, but multiple cultures. A world-economy is a large axial division of labor with multiple political centers and multiple cultures."

"Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her."

"Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world."

"The Confucian aspirant to office, stemming from the old tradition, could hardly help viewing a specialized, professional training of European stamp as anything but a conditioning in the dirtiest Philistinism. ... The fundamental assertion, ‘a cultured man is not a tool’ meant that he was an end in himself and not just a means for a specified useful purpose."

"For the Confucian, the specialistic expert could not be raised to truly positive dignity, no mater what his social usefulness. The decisive factor was that the "cultured man" (gentleman) was "not a tool"; that is, in his adjustment to the world and in his self-perfection he was an end unto himself, not a means for any functional end. This core of Confucian ethics rejected professional specialization, modern expert bureaucracy, and special training; above all, it rejected training in economics for the pursuit of profit."

"The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4."

"Slaving gave rise to a division of labor in which the business of capture, maintenance, and overland transport of slaves was in African hands, while Europeans took charge of transoceanic transport, the "seasoning" or breaking in of slaves, and their eventual distribution."

"Where Adam Smith and David Ricardo had envisaged a growing worldwide division of labor, they had thought that each country would freely select the commodities it was most qualified to produce, and that each would exchange its optimal commodity for the optimal commodity of others. Thus in Ricardo's example, Britain would send Portugal its textiles, while Britons would consume Portuguese wines in turn. What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another."

"Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns the same man makes couches, doors, plows and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts, Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialised task will do it best."

"Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependent on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth."

"In the specialist culture of our bureaucratic-industrial age, the reliance on experts to interpret and evaluate inner life is in itself the most malignant and invasive reach of division of labor."

"Management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organization."

"This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many."

"It appears to me, that any explanation of the cheapness of manufactured articles, as consequent upon the division of labour, would be incomplete if the following principle were omitted to be stated."

"The establishment of "The Times" newspaper is an example, on a large scale, of a manufactory in which the division of labour, both mental and bodily, is admirably illustrated, and in which also the effect of domestic economy is well exemplified. It is scarcely imagined, by the thousands who read that paper in various quarters of the globe, what a scene of organized activity the factory presents during the whole night, or what a quantity of talent and mechanical skill is put in action for their amusement and information."

"Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them. Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation. This natural organization is called society. The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished."

"The magnitude of the business of this road, its numerous and important connections, and. the large number of employés engaged in operating it, have led many, whose opinions are entitled to respect, to the conclusion, that a proper regard to details, which enter so largely into the elements of success in the management of all railroads, cannot possibly be attained by any plan that contemplates its organization as a whole ; and in proof of this position, the experience of shorter roads is referred to, the business operations of which have been conducted much more economically."

"In my opinion a system of operations, to be efficient and successful, should be such as to give to the principal and responsible head of the running department a complete daily history of details in all their minutiae... A few general principles, however, may be regarded as settled and necessary in its formation, amongst which are:"

"# A proper division of responsibilities."

"# Sufficient power conferred to enable the same to be fully carried out, that such responsibilities may be real in their character."

"# The means of knowing whether such responsibilities are faithfully executed."

"# Great promptness in the report of all derelictions of duty, that evils may be at once corrected."

"# Such information, to be obtained through a system of daily reports and checks that will not embarrass principal officers, nor lessen their influence with their subordinates."

"# The adoption of a system, as a whole, which will not only enable the General Superintendent to detect errors immediately, but will also point out the delinquent."

"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general."

"The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent."

"Nowadays, the phenomenon (of division of labor) has developed so generally it is obvious to all. We need have no further illusions about the tendencies of modern industry; it advances steadily towards powerful machines, towards great concentrations of forces and capital, and consequently to the extreme division of labor. Occupations are infinitely separated and specialized, not only inside the factories, but each product is itself a specialty dependent upon others. Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill still hoped that agriculture, at least, would be an exception to the rule, and they saw it as the last resort of small-scale industry. Although one must be careful not to generalize unduly in such matters, nevertheless it is hard to deny today that the principal branches of the agricultural industry are steadily being drawn into the general movement. Finally, business itself is ingeniously following and reflecting in all its shadings the infinite diversity of industrial enterprises; and, while this evolution is realizing itself with unpremeditated spontaneity, the economists, examining its causes and appreciating its results, far from condemning or opposing it, uphold it as necessary. They see in it the supreme law of human societies and the condition of their progress."

"The administrative function has many duties. It has to foresee and make preparations to meet the financial, commercial, and technical conditions under which the concern must be started and run. It deals with the organization, selection, and management of the staff. It is the means by which the various parts of the undertaking communicate with the outside world, etc. Although this list is incomplete, it gives us an idea of the importance of the administrative function. The sole fact that it is in charge of the staff makes it in most cases the predominant function, for we all know that, even if a firm has perfect machinery and manufacturing processes, it is doomed to failure if it is run by an inefficient staff."

"In the railroad operation of this country an economy of $1,000,000 a day is possible."

"In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men."

"The estimate that at least $1,000,000 a day could be saved by the pursuit of methods of scientific management was first made by Mr. Harrington Emerson. It is submitted that, with aggregate operating expenses by the railroads in 1908 of $1,669,938,717, of which $1,035,437,528 was for labor, this estimate appears moderate."

"According to Taylor, the principles of Efficiency are:"

"Modern industry is stated by some writers to have begun in 1738 when brought out a . Others place the period as between 1750 and 1800, when the and steam engine came into being. It was marked by the development of labor-saving machinery. It was brought about by the change from handicraft to manufacture."

"Early British economists held that the application of the principle of division of labor was the basis of manufacture.... Charles Babbage, believed ... in [an] "Economy of Machinery and Manufacture." It appears, however, that another principle is the basic one in the rise of industry. It is the transference of skill. The transference of skill from the inventor or designer to the power-driven mechanism brought about the industrial revolution from handicraft to manufacture. It will be necessary to refer to this principle frequently throughout this report, in showing the meaning and position of management in industry."

"The supreme principle [in Industrial Organization ] has been the belief that business efficiency and the welfare of the employees are but different sides of the same problem. Character is an economic asset ; and business efficiency depends not merely on the physical condition of employees, but on their general attitude and feeling towards the employer."

"The test of any scheme of factory organization is the extent to which it creates and fosters the atmosphere and spirit of cooperation and good-will, without in any sense lessening the loyalty of the worker to his own class and its organizations."

"The new industrial methods have greatly accelerated certain tendencies that had already manifested themselves in the old domestic factories and some of these deserve more than passing notice as they are affecting not only productive processes but our social organization as well. Perhaps the most important of these influences are those that tend toward"

"Organization aims to unite individuals into a body which shall work together for a common end. Specifically, organization prepares for the transaction of business by electing and appointing officers and committees, delegating authorities and bringing into systematic connection and cooperation, each and every part of the industrial body. Right organization, in short, puts vitality into the entire factory, secures the efficient working-together of all employees, from the manager's office to the mechanic's bench, routes materials, sub-divides work, inspects output and delivers the right goods, fully processed, at the shipping room door on the correct delivery date."

"The Methods of Industrial Management. — A committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers made an extensive canvass in the fall of 1912 to determine what were the new elements in modern management as well as what the committee designated as the regulative principles of industrial management. The committee confirmed Adam Smith's statement made in 1776 in his "Wealth of Nations," in which he held that the application of the principle of division of labor was the basis of manufacture. The committee also agreed with Charles Babbage, who in his work entitled "Economy of Machinery and Manufacture" written in 1832, added another principle, namely the transference of skill."

"Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objective of tektology is basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter."

"Through all the years that I have been in business I have never yet found our business bad as a result of any outside force. It has always been due to some defect in our own company, and whenever we located and repaired that defect our business became good again - regardless of what anyone else might be doing. And it will always be found that this country has nationally bad business when business men are drifting, and that business is good when men take hold of their own affairs, put leadership into them, and push forward in spite of obstacles. Only disaster can result when the fundamental principles of business are disregarded and what looks like the easiest way is taken. These fundamentals, as I see them, are:"

"Organization is as old as human society itself."

"Organization is the arrangement of personnel for facilitating the accomplishment of some agreed purpose through the allocation of functions and responsibilities."

"An organization comes into being when (1) there are persons able to communicate with each other (2) who are willing to contribute action (3) to accomplish a common purpose. The elements of an organization are therefore (1) communication; (2) willingness to serve; and (3) common purpose. These elements are necessary and sufficient conditions initially, and they are found in all such organizations. The third element, purpose, is implicit in the definition. Willingness to serve, and communication, and the interdependence of the three elements in general, and their mutual dependence in specifie cooperative systems, are matters of experience and observation."

"The most important thing about organizations is that, though they are tools, each nevertheless has a life of its own."

"Almost every organization... exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside."

"General Systems Theory... possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost."

"Today our main problem is that of organized complexity. Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, control, self-regulation, differentiation and the like are alien to conventional physics. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioural and social sciences, and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus, a basic problem posed to modern science is a general theory of organization."

"As a formal analytical point of reference, primacy of orientation to the attainment of a specific goal is used as the defining characteristic of an organization which distinguishes it from other types of social systems."

"It isn't the incompetent who destroy an organization. The incompetent never get into a position to destroy it. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up."

"Management has a design and operation function, as does engineering. The design is usually done under the heading of organization. It should be noted first that the performance of a group of people is a strong function of the capabilities of the individuals and a rather weak function of the way they are organized. That is, good people do a fairly good job under almost any organization and a somewhat better one when the organization is good. Poor talent does a poor job with a bad organization, but it is still a poor job no matter what the organization. Repeated reorganizations are noted in groups of individuals poorly suited to their function, though no amount of good organization will give good performance. The best architectural design fails with poor bricks and mortar. But the payoff from good organization with good people is worthwhile."

"An organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the “informal structure,” which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons."

"Organization is a mechanism or structure that enables living things to work effectively together."

"Formal theories of organization have been taught in management courses for many years, and there is an extensive literature on the subject. The textbook principles of organization — hierarchical structure, authority, unity of command, task specialization, division of staff and line, span of control, equality of responsibility and authority, etc. — comprise a logically persuasive set of assumptions which have had a profound influence upon managerial behavior."

"Classical organization theory suffers from "ethnocentrism": It ignores the significance of the political, social, and economic milieu in shaping organizations and influencing managerial practice."

"The scientific study of leadership in complex organizations, as an area of enquiry in its own right, is relatively new; hardly more than a decade old. As in any new "science" there is yet no comprehensive framework within which to operate. Unlike medical men after Harvey's great discovery on the circular system of the human body, we have no unifying concepts around which to make further refinements and discoveries."

"The basic problem of social organization is how to co-ordinate the economic activities of large numbers of people."

"I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions. Next I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs. And, finally I believe if an organization is to meet the challenge of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life. Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing..."

"Social organizations are flagrantly open systems in that the input of energies and the conversion of output into further energy input consists of transactions between the organization and its environment."

"The inevitable counterpart of specialization is organization. This is what brings the work of specialists to a coherent result. If there are many specialists, this coordination will be a major task. So complex, indeed, will be the job of organizing specialists that there will be specialists on organization and organizations of specialists on organization. More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology."

"The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action."

"People do not exist just for organizations. They track all kinds of mud from the rest of their lives into the organization, and they have all kinds of interests that are independent of the organization."

"During the last fifty years, society in every developed country has become a society of institutions. Every major social task, whether economic performance or health care, education or the protection of the environment, the pursuit of new knowledge or defense, is today being entrusted to big organizations, designed for perpetuity and managed by their own managements."

"No organization chart is likely ever to be displayed in a major art museum. What matters is not the chart but the organization. A chart is nothing but an oversimplification which enables people to make sure that they talk about the same things in discussing organization. One never makes."

"The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things."

"There is no one best way to organize... Any way of organizing is not equally effective."

"All organisations have to make provision for continuing activities directed towards the achievement of given aims. Regularities in activities such as task allocation, supervision, and co-ordination are developed. Such regularities constitute the organisation’s structure, and the fact that these activities can be arranged in various ways means that organisations can have differing structures."

"Organization design is conceived to be a decision process to bring about a coherence between the goals or purposes for which the organization exists, the patterns of division of labor and interunit coordination and the people who will do the work."

"Organizations are goal-directed, boundary-maintaining, activity systems."

"Given the five parts of the organization - operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and support staff - we may now ask how they all function together. In fact, we cannot describe the one way they function together, for research suggests that the linkages are varied and complex. The parts of the organization are joined together by different flows - of authority, of work material, of information, and of decision processes (themselves informational)."

"If an organization is to learn anything, then the distribution of its memory, the accuracy of that memory, and the conditions under which that memory is treated as a constraint become crucial characteristics of organizing."

"Any approach to the study of organizations is built on specific assumptions about the nature of organizations and how they are designed and function."

"Institutional theories of organization provide a rich, complex view of organizations. In these theories, organizations are influenced by normative pressures, sometimes arising from external sources such as the state, other times arising from within the organization itself. Under some conditions, these pressures lead the organization to be guided by legitimated elements, from standard operating procedures to professional certification and state requirement, which often have the effect of directing attention away from task performance... Institutional theories of organization have spread rapidly, a testimony to the power of the imaginative ideas developed in theoretical and empirical work."

"We create organizations to serve us, but somehow they also force us to serve them. Sometimes it feels as if our institutions have run out of control, like the machinery of Charlie Chaplin's film Modem Times. Why we should become slaves to our servants... A society of organizations is one in which organizations enter our lives as influential forces in a great many ways — in how we work, what we eat, how we get educated and cured of our illnesses, how we get entertained, and how our ideas are shaped. The ways in which we try to control our organization and our organization in return try to control us become major issues in the lives of all of us."

"The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - need not be signs of an impending disorder that will destroy us. Instead, fluctuations are the primary source of creativity."

"Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. Organization theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilization of resources, and the coordination of effort that facilitate the joint survival of an organization and its members."

"We are organizational creatures. We are born not only into a society and culture but usually into a specific, complex organization: a family. Our marriages are organizations. We study in schools that are organizations; we earn a living in businesses that are organizations; at some time or another we will likely worship in an organization; and when we die there will be organizations to usher us out of this world."

"We don't know what organization is. ...We do know that complex adaptive systems have to be nonlinear and capable of storing information. ...We know a little bit about what distinguishes an adaptive complex system from a nonadaptive system, such as turbulent fluid flow."

"By organization Maturana refers to the relations between components that give a system its identity, that make it a member of a particular type. Thus, if the organization of a system changes, so does its identity. By structure Maturana means the actual components and relations between components that constitute a particular example of a type of system. The organization is realized through the structure, but it is the structure that can interact and change. So long as the structural changes maintain the organization, the system’s identity remains."

"The Internet is the technological basis for the organizational form of the Information Age: the network.""

"Cultures are not made from free-floating values. They are rooted in institutions and organizations."

"Self-organization [is] the appearance of structure or pattern without an external agent imposing it."

"Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value."

"In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions."

"Any social organization does well enough if it isn't rigid. The framework doesn't matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros."

"From a legal point of view, an organisation is a legal person. It is legitimised, under the laws of the land, by a legally recognised and binding constitution specifying purpose, procedures to be followed, hierarchical offices to be taken up, authority to be granted, and membership criteria and categories."

"We use the word "organization" to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing... We use one word for both because, at a certain scale, we haven't been able to get organization without organizations; the former seems to imply the latter."

"Organizations are (1) social entities that (2) are goal-directed, (3) are designed as deliberately structured and coordinated activity systems, and (4) are linked to the external environment."

"The essence of an organisation is not the bricks, or the people, but the means in which these are combined."

"A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now, quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict. Its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world, shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives. It's easy to underestimate because it's not accompanied by banners or fanfare. It's been called the technological or information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the tiny silicon chip, no bigger than a fingerprint. One of these chips has more computing power than a roomful of old-style computers. As part of an exchange program, we now have an exhibition touring your country that shows how information technology is transforming our lives -- replacing manual labor with robots, forecasting weather for farmers, or mapping the genetic code of DNA for medical researchers. These microcomputers today aid the design of everything from houses to ears to spacecraft; they even design better and faster computers. They can translate English into Russian or enable the blind to read or help Michael Jackson produce on one synthesizer the sounds of a whole orchestra. Linked by a network of satellites and fiber-optic cables, one individual with a desktop computer and a telephone commands resources unavailable to the largest governments just a few years ago."

"In the industrialized nations, a technological revolution is taking place—a revolution marked by rapid, dramatic advances in computers and telecommunications."

"Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. … The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip."

"In 1980 a law was passed called the . It could have been called the Information Management Act of 1980."

"We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information."

"Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself unhappy if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries."

"True personalization is now upon us. It's not just a matter of selecting relish over mustard once. The post-information age is about acquaintance over time: machines' understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings, including idiosyncrasies (like always wearing a blue-striped shirt) and totally random events, good and bad, in the unfolding narrative of our lives."

"The Information Age is unfolding just as predicted by many of the sociological prognosticators of this century. Information issues are on everyone’s mind and on multitudes of lips. It is hard to pick up a newspaper or current affairs magazine without seeing a feature on the internet, web pages, e-mail, television terminals or some other new technology. In fact, technology innovation is relentless and escalating and technology stocks continually drive the stock market to high after high. There is no field of human endeavor that is exempt from the onslaught of information technology."

"Yet today our military is still organized more for Cold War threats than for the challenges of a new century -- for industrial age operations, rather than for information age battles. There is almost no relationship between our budget priorities and a strategic vision. The last seven years have been wasted in inertia and idle talk. Now we must shape the future with new concepts, new strategies, new resolve."

"We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country, but among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential of the Information Age."

"The Internet is the technological basis for the organizational form of the Information Age the network."

"Almost everybody is sure... that it is proceeding with unprecedented speed; and... that its effects will be more radical than anything that has gone before. Wrong, and wrong again. Both in its speed and its impact, the information revolution uncannily resembles its two predecessors... The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s... did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829... Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s... it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes... the same emergence of the “super-rich” of their day, characterized both the first and the second industrial revolutions... These parallels are close and striking enough to make it almost certain that, as in the earlier industrial revolutions, the main effects of the information revolution on the next society still lie ahead."

"The information age is an age of permanently getting stuck. Greater and greater speed is demanded. New software, new hardware, new structures, new cultural techniques. Life-long learning? Yes. But the company can't fire the secretary every six months, just because she can't cope with the new version of Excel. They can count their keystrokes, measure their productivity … but! They will never be able to sanction their inability! Because that is immanent."

"In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show."

"The Information age is well upon us in seven major fields — learning, diagnostics, management, physical planning, finance, entertainment and communication."

"In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers."

"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."

"Understanding how maps work and why maps work (or do not work) as representations in their own right and as prompts to further representations, and what it means for a map to work, are critical issues as we embark on a visual information age."

"An efficient telecommunications network is the foundation upon which an information society is built."

"One nation controlled by the media; information age of hysteria."

"The information revolution reinforced the spread of democracy because it permitted people to inform themselves and react to what they learned more quickly than in the past. It became more difficult during the Cold War to withhold news about what was going on in the rest of the world, as well as to conceal what was happening within one's own country. This kind of "transparency" provided new kinds of leverage against authoritarian regimes, as the Helsinki process dramatically illustrated. It also brought assurance, where dictatorships had been overthrown, that they would not return."

"Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge."

"It's very sad how in the information age you cannot get information into people's heads — as long as you write something on the internet and do not add LOL — it is true : "I'm not sure he's a Christian." — I'm not sure he's a mammal, Jay. He could be a werewolf."

"Professional partisans are still playing politics by industrial-age rules. They haven’t woken up to the information age reality. Younger generations have grown up with a multiplicity of choice on every front, which can be tailored to suit their individual beliefs. Politics is the last place where we are supposed to be satisfied with a choice between Brand A and Brand B."

"With the massive amount of personal data on the Internet, Facebook nation has opened Pandora's box of total information awareness in the age of big data. Fortunately, Pandora's box released not only evil but also hope.. The hope is that good will trump evil."

"Information paints no picture, sings no song, and writes no poem."

"While we claim to live in an information age, disinformation has become the order of the day."

"The general notion in communication theory is that of information. In many cases, the flow of information corresponds to a flow of energy, e.g. if light waves emitted by some objects reach the eye or a photoelectric cell, elicit some reaction of the organism or some machinery, and thus convey information."

"A more viable model, one much more faithful to the kind of system that society is more and more recognized to be, is in process of developing out of, or is in keeping with, the modern systems perspective (which we use loosely here to refer to general systems research, cybernetics, information and communication theory, and related fields). Society, or the sociocultural system, is not, then, principally an equilibrium system or a homeostatic system, but what we shall simply refer to as a complex adaptive system."

"They developed a model of communication which was intended to assist in developing a mathematical theory of communication. Shannon and Weaver's work proved valuable for communication engineers in dealing with such issues as the capacity of various communication channels in 'bits per second'. It contributed to computer science. It led to very useful work on redundancy in language. And in making 'information' 'measurable' it gave birth to the mathematical study of 'information theory'"

"The theory of communication is partly concerned with the measurement of information content of signals, as their essential property in the establishment of communication links. But the information content of signals is not to be regarded as a commodity; it is more a property or potential of the signals, and as a concept it is closely related to the idea of selection, or discrimination. This mathematical theory first arose in telegraphy and telephony, being developed for the purpose of measuring the information content of telecommunication signals. It concerned only the signals themselves as transmitted along wires, or broadcast through the aether, and is quite abstracted from all questions of "meaning." Nor does it concern the importance, the value, or truth to any particular person. As a theory, it lies at the syntactic level of sign theory and is abstracted from the semantic and pragmatic levels. We shall argue … that, though the theory does not directly involve biological elements, it is nevertheless quite basic to the study of human communication — basic but insufficient."

"Communication theory is enormously rich in the range of ideas that fall within its nominal scope, and new theoretical work on communication has recently been flourishing. Nevertheless, despite the ancient roots and growing profusion of theories about communication, I argue that communication theory as an identifiable field of study does not yet exist."

"Incomplete knowledge of the future, and also of the past of the transmitter from which the future might be constructed, is at the very basis of the concept of information. On the other hand, complete ignorance also precludes communication; a common language is required, that is to say an agreement between the transmitter and the receiver regarding the elements used in the communication process... [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.' These data comprise both the convention regarding the symbols and the language used, and the knowledge available at the moment when the message started. [A Summary of Communication Theory]"

"General evolution theory, based on the integration of the relevant tenets of general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, can convey a sound understanding of the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems in the various realms of investigation.... The basic notions of this new discipline can be developed to give an adequate account of the dynamical evolution of human societies as well. Such an account could furnish the basis of a system of knowledge better able to orient human beings and societies in their rapidly changing milieu."

"The very essence of mass communication theory is a simple but all-embracing expression of technological determinism, since the essential features depend on what certain technologies have made possible, certain technologies have made possible, especially the following: communication at a distance, the multiplication and simultaneous distribution of diverse ‘messages’, the enormous capacity and speed of carriers, and the limitations on response. There is no escaping the implication that public communication as practised in modern societies is profoundly shaped by these general features"

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation."

"Characteristically, major social movements are spawned in obscurity at the periphery of public awareness, seem to burst suddenly and dramatically into public view, and eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience."

"Wherever people prefer to call upon "offenses against moral sentience", upon "moral terms" rather than adhere to one's rationally derived scientific criminological approach [dividing irrational, ethnocentric "moral offenses" from actual crimes], one is fully justified in speaking of prejudice's total victory over reason."

"In Victorian criminology there was an enthusiasm for spotting criminal tendencies in a person’s features."

"One semester we took Criminology, for God's sake! Criminology! Who the fuck were we studying to be: Batman?"

""Lawsuit mania"… a continual craving to go to law against others, while considering themselves the injured party."

"Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses."

"Existing criminology is insufficient to isolate barbarism. It is insufficient because the idea of "crime" in existing criminology is artificial, for what is called crime is really an infringement of "existing laws", whereas "laws" are very often a manifestation of barbarism and violence. Such are the prohibiting laws of different kinds which abound in modern life. The number of these laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. On the other hand, unquestionable crimes escape the field of vision of criminology, either because they have not recognized the form of crime or because they surpass a certain scale. In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity."

"No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

"Nothing is so unworthy of a civilised nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct."

"Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place."

"In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea ... gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage - if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. ... No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous."

"I use the term groupthink as a quick and easy way to refer to the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. Groupthink is a term of the same order as the words in the newspeak vocabulary George Orwell used in his dismaying world of 1984. In that context, groupthink takes on an invidious connotation. Exactly such a connotation is intended, since the term refers to a deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgments as a result of group pressures."

"The main principle of groupthink, which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson's Law, is this: The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups."

"All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an inclined plane represented by large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; what the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good."

"Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!"

"Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority."

"Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience. Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it — the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers — felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men. The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect — nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time."

"The common characteristics of "groupthink" include: an illusion of invulnerability; an unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality; collective efforts to discount warnings; stereotyped views of the enemy as evil; self-censorship of deviations from group beliefs; a shared illusion of unanimity; suppression of dissent; and the emerge of self-appointed mind-guards who screen the group from dissidents."

"It becomes clear that the Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo experiments replicated, in a compressed time, the dynamics of authority and groupthink that play a critical role in our socialization. Asch showed that once the standard is set, people will adopt it and go along with it, even if it is illogical. When the stakes are raised, as they were in Milgram's work, people may struggle with unethical commands, but the majority still obey. And when authorities set parameters but leave the decision-making to the rest of us, we still have a tendency to impose strict control on those we consider deviant. All of these findings affirm the power of culture, socialization, and our widespread fear that we will be judged and punished. Since human beings have a desperate need for safety, approval, and belonging (which yields access to group resources), the worst kind of punishment is ostracism. This shunning may be subtle or extreme."

"The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts."

"Groupthink is characterized by a shared "illusion of invulnerability," an exaggerated belief in the competence of the group, a "shared illusion of unanimity" within the group, and a number of other symptoms"

"Thinking things through is hard work and it sometimes seems safer to follow the crowd. That blind adherence to such group thinking is, in the long run, far more dangerous than independently thinking things through"

"Groupthink being a coinage — and, admittedly, a loaded one — a working definition is in order. We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity — it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity — an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well."

"I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan. Rather than providing a religious analysis, however, I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts."

"Most managers receive much more data (if not information) than they can possibly absorb even if they spend all of their time trying to do so. Hence they already suffer from an information overload."

"The lower the rank of managers, the more they know about fewer things. The higher the rank of managers, the less they know about many things."

"Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal."

"Like every other department in Zephyr, Training Sales has an open floor plan, which means everyone works in a sprawling cubicle farm except the manager, who has an office with a glass internal wall, across which blinds are permanently drawn. Open-plan seating, it has been explained in company-wide memos, increases teamwork, and boosts productivity. Except in managers, that is, whose productivity tends to be boosted by—and the memos don’t say this, but the conclusion is inescapable—corner offices with excellent views."

"How she became manager remains a mystery. But there are only two possibilities. One is that Senior Management mistook her tirades for drive and a commitment to excellence. The other is that they knew Sydney was a paranoid psychopath, and that’s exactly the kind of person they want in management."

"The strategies that managers employ are at least as important as the facilities at their disposal."

"I believe that leaders and leadership teams working together in a proper design will run the business more effectively than by hierarchical, command-and-control managing. But I can't prove that. And there are no models."

"I think that not relying too heavily on one bank and one bank manager is a good rule to learn."

"It’s simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation."

"If you have a great manager, you want to pay him very well."

"After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I WANT TO SEE THE MANAGER.""

"As for the employees, the payment in stock options revives, somewhat ironically, the old anarchist ideology of self-management of the company, as they are co-owners, co-producers, and co-managers of the firm."

"These are the duties of the overseer: He should maintain discipline. He should observe the feast days. He should respect the rights of others and steadfastly uphold his own. He should settle all quarrels among the hands; If any one is at fault he should administer the punishment. He should take care that no one on the place is in want, or lacks food or drink; in this respect he can afford to be generous, for he will thus more easily prevent picking and stealing."

"Roughly speaking, I think it's accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure. The people, so-called, do exercise an occasional choice among those who Marx once called "the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling class.""

"Concentration of ownership in the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well..."

"[I]n the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on … people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much."

"Only the general manager can mold the resources, processes, and values that affect innovation, into a coherent capability to develop and launch superior new products and services repeatedly."

"We have overwhelming evidence that available information plus analysis does not lead to knowledge. The management science team can properly analyse a situation and present recommendations to the manager, but no change occurs. The situation is so familiar to those of us who try to practice management science that I hardly need to describe the cases."

"Everybody's daily life consists of problems arising from what you decided yesterday. Managers understand that. Mathematicians want to solve a theorem, publish the results and walk away clean. Managers never walk away clean. The real world is a very dirty place. Clarity is supposed to be the objective of science. I disagree. I think the objective of science is confusion, because confusions carries you into problems."

"When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no."

"The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work."

"Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service...The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow."

"A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. This is not ranking people. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management."

"A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people."

"A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates"

"Systems analysis, conceived in a policy sciences framework, is the macro instrument of the systems manager for understanding, evaluating and improving human systems — which are defined as goal oriented interdependent units incorporating people, organization and some form of technology for control, administration or output."

"To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate and to control. To foresee and plan means examining the future and drawing up the plan of action. To organize means building up the dual structure, material and human, of the undertaking. To command means binding together, unifying and harmonizing all activity and effort. To control means seeing that everything occurs in conformity with established rule and expressed demand."

"[In France] a minister has twenty assistants, where the Administrative Theory says that a manager at the head of a big undertaking should not have more than five or six."

"Lack of specificity around stakeholder identity remains a serious obstacle to the further development of stakeholder theory and its adoption in actual practice by business managers. Nowhere is this shortcoming more evident than in stakeholder theory's treatment of the constituency known as 'community."

"Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards."

"The greatest problem before engineers and managers today is the economical utilization of labor. The limiting of output by the workman, and the limiting by the employer of the amount a workman is allowed to earn, are both factors which militate against that harmonious co-operation of employer and employee which is essential to their highest common good."

"The increase of this efficiency is essentially the problem of the manager, and the amount to which it can be increased by proper study is, in most cases, so great as to be almost incredible."

"We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least."

"Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain."

"the net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers."

"Managers are to information as alcoholics are to booze. They consume enormous amounts, constantly crave more, but have great difficulty in digesting their existing intake."

"In the unexamined American Dream rhetoric promoting mass higher education in the nation of my youth, the implicit vision was that one day everyone, or at least practically everyone, would be a manager or a professional. We would use the most elitist of all means, scholarship, toward the most egalitarian of ends. We would all become chiefs; hardly anyone would be left a mere Indian."

"I think managers have realized that most software people are slightly brain damaged, that they're off on their own planets."

"The ’s job is not an easy one. Project managers may have increasing responsibility, but very little authority. This lack of authority can force them to “negotiate” with upper-level management as well as functional management for control of company resources. They may often be treated as outsiders by the formal organization."

"In business the 80/20 principle is behind any innovation, any extra value. It is an entrepreneurial principle, a formula for value creation utilized not only by entrepreneurs, but by most managers and organizations."

"There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours' publicity."

"We are not utopians, we do not indulge in "dreams" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination; these anarchist dreams…serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and "managers." … The united workers themselves…will hire their own technicians, managers and bookkeepers, and pay them all, as, indeed, every state official, ordinary workmen's wages."

"The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness ... The therapist also treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with technique, with effectiveness ... Neither manager nor therapist, in their roles as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in moral debate. They ... purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement in possible—that is, ... to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness."

"If a manager asks an academic consultant what to do and that consultant answers, then the consultant should be fired. No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation."

"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business."

"As far as possible the duty of a leader is to foresee dissatisfaction and to remedy injustice before complaints are made. To accomplish this he must maintain close contact with the men he controls. Let him go into the trenches if he is a general; let him arrive at the factory with his workmen now and then if he is the manager. He must have some imagination; an understanding of other men's lives is necessary to him, so that he may be able to protect those under him from unnecessary suffering. The secret of gaining their affection is to feel affection for them and to be able to do their jobs as well as they do them themselves. Men endure taking orders, and even like it, if the orders are given intelligently."

"Failure to delegate causes managers to be crushed and fail under the weight of accumulated duties that they do not know and have not learned to delegate."

"We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information."

"Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs — and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information."

"We tell our young managers: 'Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice'."

"The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a familylike feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate."

"The anxiety has been greatly increased by this government's multiplication of exams and emphasis on starting training as a middle manager in a computer company from the age of six."

"In their work, designers often become expert with the device they are designing. Users are often expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device. [...] Professional designers are usually aware of the pitfalls. But most design is not done by professional designers, it is done by engineers, programmers, and managers."

"I believe that science is best left to scientists, that you cannot have managers or directors of science, it's got to be carried out and done by people with ideas, people with concepts, people who feel in their bones that they want to go ahead and develop this, that, or the other concept which occurs to them."

"Managers within organizations sometimes confront a type of problem that is difficult to solve, in part, because the problems involve many stakeholders with diverse perspectives. The different assumptions from each perspective result in differing views of the problem and potential solutions. It is difficult to produce a satisfactory potential solution when the formulation of the problem definition is the major concern and when applying a potential solution risks unintended consequences. Churchman (1967, p. 141) writes that the solutions proposed to solve these problems "often turned out to be worse than the symptoms""

"To manage, learn your management skills from the greatest managers and those who were perfectionist by reading their failures."

"It is a human inclination to hope things will work out, despite evidence or doubt to the contrary. A successful manager must resist this temptation."

"The man in charge must concern himself with details. If he does not consider them important, neither will his subordinates. Yet “the devil is in the details.” It is hard and monotonous to pay attention to seemingly minor matters. In my work, I probably spend about ninety-nine percent of my time on what others may call petty details. Most managers would rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when the details are ignored, the project fails. No infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then correct the situation."

"The corporate manager who achieves success by honest efficiency in giving the best service to the public should be favored because we all benefit by his efficiency. […] he should be helped by the Government because his success is good for the National welfare. But a man who, grasps and holds business power by breaking the industrial efficiency of others, who wins success by methods which are against‘ the public interest and degrading to the public morals, should not be permitted to ‘ exercise such power. Instead of punishing him by a long and doubtful process of the law after the wrong has been com- mitted, there should be such effective Government regulation as to check the evil tendencies at the moment that they start do develop."

"We have an autocracy which — which runs this university. It's managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?" That's the answer.Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be — have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean — Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!"

"The world doesn't need a manager, or a boss, or a policeman. These aren't the heroes of today. The heroes of today are those who are doing what they want to be doing, having a good time, and introducing the one thing that every man, woman and child hungers for on a daily basis: happiness."

"Now the secret to successful managing is to break down your club. The first 15 guys you don't have to bother with. They are always playing and don't need the manager. The next five play only occasionally, so you got to keep buttering them up. The last five you gotta watch all the time because they're plotting to get you fired."

"While an equilibrium between worker and manager is possible, because both are workers, that which it is sought to establish between worker and owner is not. Their proposals may be excellent: but it is not evident why they are where they are, or how, since they do not contribute to production, they come to be putting forward proposals at all. As long as they are in territory where they have no business to be, their excellence as individuals will be overlooked."

"… The war has shown us that we have tremendous resources to make all the materials for war. It has shown us that we have skillful workers and managers and able generals, and a brave people capable of bearing arms. All these things we knew before. The new thing — the thing which we had not known — the thing we have learned now and should never forget, is this: that a society of self-governing men is more powerful, more enduring, more creative than any other kind of society, however disciplined, however centralized."

"Big businesses are often run by managers or bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs. So they morph into the Civil Service."

"Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself."

"Little things win or lose big games. It is not the job of a manager to think for the players, but to show them how to think for themselves."

"A manager's to give advice, not to physically get involved."

"If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy."

"The Universal, in the name of which an oppressive particularity came to dominate the globe, suddenly seems the last bastion against a neoliberal world order that is happy enough to maintain differences ... as long as they are subsumed without resistance within the global market."

"Multiculturalism in Europe is dead in the water, as every recent election has shown. Even the politicians are admitting it now. Some people cling to the illusion of it still, the way the Soviets clung to the illusion of Communism, but it’s over, and these show trials and violent street attacks are symptoms of its death throes. They’re the desperate acts of desperate people who’ve totally lost their way. Criminalizing opinion is an open admission that lawmakers have lost control, and created a situation they can’t handle. But that’s what happens when the people are never asked for their opinion, and, when they give it, it’s ignored."

"Indeed, we’ve encouraged it by fostering separatism and ghettoization in the guise of our old friend, Multiculturalism. And as a consequence, Islamic violence against women and girls is an ugly reality in Europe. And for anyone to use the law to try and suppress discussion of it is not enlightened or tolerant or liberal. It’s shameful and stupid and cowardly and unforgivable."

"If you try to discuss multiculturalism in the UK you're labelled a racist. But here we're still free to talk, and I say multicultural society doesn't work. We're not living closer, we're living apart."

"[S]o many languages were spoken in Malaysia that quite often the wheels of justice ground to a standstill for the lack of an interpreter who could restore the tower of babel to a court of law."

"[H]e was in a holding pen with various members of the Kuala Lumpur criminal fraternity and they scared him [...] They ranged from a Chinese gang member, whose dragon tattoo foraged up his arm and curled around his neck, to a large, [sic] Indian man with a jet-black moustache and pocked-marked face, brooding in a corner. The majority of his cellmates appeared from their accents to be Indonesians, part of the large contingent of illegal immigrants in Malaysia. [...] At least, he thought, the government should be proud that their efforts to integrate the various races in Malaysia into a cohesive society were bearing such fruit. It was a very multi-racial group that was penned in together."

"I’m tired of being told how bad America is by leftwing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women’s rights of Saudi Arabia, the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Gay people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela. Won’t multiculturalism be beautiful?"

"I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country."

"The dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."

"My gorge rises at the use of the word 'white.' The issue should never be the colour of somebody's skin. I thought we all very, very long ago accepted that what mattered about somebody was not the colour of his skin but the content of his character. And I'm not interested in what colour they are. The real question is, does a country which has a very large amount of immigration adapt to the immigrants, or do the immigrants who arrived in that country adapt to that country. And it's my very strong view that the only hope of a tranquil and peaceful and productive and successful society is that the migrants adapt to the place to which they come. And for very many years we have not been encouraging or indeed helping them to do that. We've been encouraging, through a policy of official state multiculturalism, that people should stay separate ,and should remain within their migrant communities and we have not created a single British nationality. There are various feeble efforts to make them take exams in how to claim social security benefits, or who was Winston Churchill. That is not the same. We have ceased to be proud of our own country, culture, history, religion, language, and we haven't asked our new citizens to be proud of them either. And we now see the result of that. It's not a question whether they're white. It's a question whether they're British. And my fear is they're not becoming British and the Britain is ceasing to be Britain, and that is a very great shame both for us who were already here, and for those who have come."

"When you are a person who comes from a multicultural background it just means that you have more information coming in from the universe. And it's your task to figure out how it all integrates, figure out its order and its beauty. It's a harder, longer struggle."

"Multiculturalism flourishes as a programme while it weakens as a reality."

"What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the demise of utopia."

"Endless discussions of multiculturalism proceed from the unsubstantiated assumption that numerous distinct “cultures” constitute American society. Only a few historians or observers even consider the possibility that the opposite may be true: that the world and the United States are relentlessly becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse. … No group is able, and few are willing, to stand up to the potent homogenizing forces of advanced industrial society. All Americans, from African Americans to Greek Americans, buy the same goods, look at the same movies and television, pursue the same activities and have—more or less—the same desires for success. … Multiculturalism is not the opposite of assimilation, but its product."

"The values of Western civilization are not just different, they're better. OK? I know a whole generation has been raised on the notion of multiculturalism, that all civilizations are just different. No! Not always, some times things are better! Rule of law is better than autocracy and theocracy. Equality of the sexes, better. Protection of minorities, better. Free speech, better. Free elections, better."

"Contrary to all those who think that the time to speak of multiculturalism is over, I think it is most timely and necessary, and that we need more not less. ... For multiculturalism is a form of integration. It is the form of integration that best meets the normative implications of equal citizenship and under our present post-9/11, post-7/7 circumstances stands the best chance of succeeding. Moreover, contrary to the claims of its critics (and sometimes of its advocates), the key trends and developments are broadly consistent with a moderate, pragmatic yet, inevitably, uneven multiculturalism."

"In the Mahabharata, the ceremony for the oath of a new king includes the admonition: 'Be like a garland-maker, O king, and not like a charcoal burner.' The garland symbolizes social coherence; it is a metaphor for dharmic diversity in which flowers of many colors and forms are strung harmoniously for the most pleasing effect. In contrast, the charcoal burner is a metaphor for the brute-force reduction of diversity into homogeneity, where diverse living substances are transformed into uniformly lifeless ashes."

"Whenever two religions are brought into contact, when members of each live together in peace, abstaining from all direct attempts at conversion, whether by force or by argument, though conscious all the time of the fact that they and their religion are on their trial, that they are being watched, that they are responsible for all they say and do—the effect has always been the greatest blessing to both. It calls out all the best elements in each, and at the same time keeps under all that is felt to be of doubtful value, of uncertain truth. Whenever this has happened in the history of the world, it has generally led either to the reform of both systems, or to the foundation of a new religion."

"Multiculturalism is about the proper terms of relationship between different cultural communities. The norms governing their respective claims, including the principles of justice, cannot be derived from one culture alone but through an open and equal dialogue between them."

"Multiculturalism is not about safeguarding self-contained ethnic and cultural boxes but rather about intercultural fusion in which a culture freely borrows bits of others and creatively transforms both itself and them. Far from implying that each individual should remain rooted in his or her own culture and flit between them, multiculturalism requires that they should open themselves up to the influence of others and engage in a reflective and sometimes life enhancing dialogue with others. Multiculturalism is not ghettoisation but a form of universalism, and represents one of the highest expressions of human freedom and self-creation."

"Islam chose to unite earth and heaven in a single system, present both in the heart of the individual and the actuality of society, recognizing no separation of practical exertion from religious impulse. ... The center of its being and the field of its action is human life in its entirety, spiritual and material, religious and worldly. Such a religion cannot continue to exist in isolation from society, nor can its adherents be true Muslims unless they practice their faith in their social, legal and economic relationships."

"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else."

"Multiculturalism with an emphasis on freedom and reasoning has to be distinguished from "plural monoculturalism" with single-focus priorities and a rigid cementing of divisions. Multicultural education is certainly important, but it should not be about bundling children into preordained faith schools. Awareness of world civilisation and history is necessary. Religious madrasas may take little interest in the fact that when a modern mathematician invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, she helps to commemorate the secular contributions of Al-Khwarizmi, the great ninth-century Muslim mathematician, from whose name the term algorithm is derived ("algebra" comes from his book, Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah). There is no reason at all why old Brits as well as new Brits should not celebrate those grand connections. The world is not a federation of religious ethnicities. Nor, one hopes, is Britain."

"Today people commonly use the word "fascism" instead of "national socialism." Presumably this is what you are asking. No. Hitlerism had racism as its essential dogmatic foundation. But in a multiethnic country, such an ideology has no chance of success. And Russia has never had such a movement. But if we speak about the rampage of militant chauvinism, then it exists--and in bloody form--in several republics of the former U.S.S.R., but certainly not in Russia. And if one were to count all the instances of violence perpetrated on nationalist grounds and in local wars, all of them took place outside of Russia and were not perpetrated by Russians."

"The great thing about multiculturalism is it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I think was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society."

"Multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon."

"The current ideology of religious harmony emphasizes similarity—different religions are harmonious because they say the same thing; The older doctrine of multiple paths lays stress on their diversity—these paths are valid because they serve genuine different needs and answer to different natures. In short, they serve humanity not by being the same but by being different."

"Multiculturalism is our present-day version of Stalinism — a culture of moral virtue without any thought."

"In its simplest, most basic context, multiculturalism is the name for an approach that shows us another way of using knowledge to understand ideas and events. Most often a multicultural approach uses several disciplines to highlight neglected aspects of our social history, particularly the histories of women and minorities. Concepts of race, class, culture, gender, and ethnicity are the driving themes of a multicultural approach, which also promotes respect for the dignity of the lives and voices of the forgotten."

"By closing gaps, by raising consciousness about the past, multiculturalism tries to restore a sense of wholeness in a postmodern era that fragments human life and thought."

"Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: The multiculturalist Left is facilitating islamization. Leftist multiculturalists are cheering for every new shariah bank, for every new islamic school, for every new mosque. Multiculturalists consider Islam as being equal to our own culture. Shariah law or democracy? Islam or freedom? It doesn't really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire leftist elite is guilty of practising cultural relativism. Universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians. They are all betraying our hard-won liberties."

"I believe that the biggest disease in Europe today is called cultural relativism. And I want to fight with all my life this misconception by politically correct, often liberal and leftist politicians, who invented the multicultural society, that all cultures are equal. ... I am proud to say that our culture – that is based on Christianity, on Judaism, on Humanism – is not only better, far better, than what I see as a barbaric Islamic culture, and that we should fight to preserve it for our children."

"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self."

"Der ursprünglichen Walten des „Selbst“-Erhaltungstriebs haftet das w:de:Ichbewusstsein ebenso wenig an wie dem der anderen Triebe; nicht das Ich will sich da fortpflanzen, sondern der Leib, der noch von keinem Ich weiß."

"I took some bad acid in November of 1965, and the after effect left me crazy and helpless for six months. My mind would drift into a place that was very electrical and crackly, filled with harsh, abrasive, low grade, cartoony, tawdry carnival visions. There was a nightmarish mechanical aspect to everyday life. My ego was so shattered, so fragmented that it didn't get in the way during what was the most unself-conscious period of my life. I was kind of on automatic pilot and was still constantly drawing. Most of my popular characters — Mr. Natural, Flaky Foont, Angelfood McSpade, Eggs Ackley, The Snoid, The Vulture Demonesses, Av' n' Gar, Shuman the Human, the Truckin' guys, Devil Girl—all suddenly appeared in the drawings in my sketchbook in this period, early 1966. Amazing! I was relieved when it was finally over, but I also immediately missed the egoless state of that strange interlude."

"To be fully alive is a stupendous struggle! We want the rewards without the struggle — a fatal error! … No such thing as an easy life! Everybody has a hard time … struggle or die! To find out what's really going on it's necessary to get around the ego … an art requiring persistent and determined effort … Me, me, me… myself & I … oh no!!! Trapped in my stupid self!"

"Q: How do you define ego? A: Ego is life. To keep the body's existence is ego. It is the part of the mind which identifies a creature with the world. Ego self tells you , “This is my body,” and also tells you, “This is my Self.” It connects the two."

"Just like pure water poured in a dirty cup becomes dirty, similarly the pure ego rooted in the impure mind becomes impure ego."

"The ego has no form and no particular center of existence. It pervades the mind, intellect, senses, and the body as 'I am'."

"Q: How do I know about the ego: can it be our friend? A: More than a friend, it is our life. Ego works through mind, intellect, and senses. Its field of activity is desires and attachments (instruments)... but one who wants to get liberated from the cycle of birth and death, then the ego should be separated from its instruments."

"Q: Is it possible for us to identify with the Self rather than the ego? A: Without knowing the ego, we can't even touch the Self."

"The ego is not master in its own house."

"It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world."

"The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions."

"Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."

"One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go."

"Where id is, there shall ego be."

"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as "the reality," including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous — that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations. Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank."

"Ego and the outer world are separated in the normal condition of consciousness, in everyday reality; one stands face-to-face with the outer world; it has become an object. In the LSD state the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world more or less disappear, depending on the depth of the inebriation. Feedback between receiver and sender takes place. A portion of the self overflows into the outer world, into objects, which begin to live, to have another, a deeper meaning. This can be perceived as a blessed, or as a demonic transformation imbued with terror, proceeding to a loss of the trusted ego. In an auspicious case, the new ego feels blissfully united with the objects of the outer world and consequently also with its fellow beings. This experience of deep oneness with the exterior world can even intensify to a feeling of the self being one with the universe. This condition of cosmic consciousness, which under favorable conditions can be evoked by LSD or by another hallucinogen from the group of Mexican sacred drugs, is analogous to spontaneous religious enlightenment, with the unio mystica. In both conditions, which often last only for a timeless moment, a reality is experienced that exposes a gleam of the transcendental reality, in which universe and self, sender and receiver, are one."

"The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach."

"The Satanist believes in complete gratification of his ego. Satanism, in fact, is the only religion which advocates the intensification or encouragement of the ego. Only if a person's own ego is sufficiently fulfilled, can he afford to be kind and complimentary to others, without robbing himself of his self-respect. We generally think of a braggart as a person with a large ego; in reality, his bragging results from a need to satisfy his impoverished ego."

"ALL religions of a spiritual nature are inventions of man. He has created an entire system of gods with nothing more than his carnal brain. Just because he has an ego, and cannot accept it, he has to externalize it into some great spiritual device which he calls "God"."

"Religionists have kept their followers in line by suppressing their egos. By making their followers feel inferior, the awesomeness of their god is insured. Satanism encourages its members to develop a good strong ego because it gives them the self-respect necessary for a vital existence in this life. If a person has been vital throughout his life and has fought to the end for his earthly existence, it is this ego which will refuse to die, even after the expiration of the flesh which housed it."

"Step by step, let whatever happens happen. Real change will come when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality. Awareness releases reality to change you."

"To those who seek to protect their ego true Peace brings only disturbance."

"One always treads with a joyful step when one has dropped the burden called the ego."

"I often say to my students, when they first come and they begin to feel the infiniteness, the joy and the deep peace, and they feel very happy, I say to them, Don’t just joyride. Be quiet. Be one with this. Know that this is beyond belief. This is direct experience. But because this is taking place in you, a storm is coming. And this storm is the storm of ego! The storm of ego is going to come to crush what you have discovered, to bring fear in you, to make you feel that you are making a mistake, to bring in states of confusion. And some of you may give in to that and run away, and feel, ‘No, I must not do this anymore!’ But I want to encourage you. This exercise, this ‘meditation’, you may call it, comes from the very core of your Self. It comes from the God-place in you. And this tendency to run comes from the negativity, the toxicity that we have picked up in life. That is going to come up as though it wants to ruin your Garden of Eden inside your heart. I am telling you ahead of time that all beings who awakened to their true nature experienced these types of resistance, this type of aggression from the mind."

"An unripe ego cannot be thrown, cannot be destroyed. And if you struggle with an unripe ego to destroy and dissolve it, the whole effort is going to be a failure. Rather than destroying it, you will find it more strengthened in new subtle ways. This is something basic to be understood: the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity — only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved."

"Campus speech codes, that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide."

"Kyle: You know what, Cartman? I believe you."

"The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's."

"Egocentrism in children clearly appears to be a simple continuation of solipsism in infants. Egocentrism, as we have seen, is not an intentional or even a conscious process. A child has no idea that he is egocentric. He believes everybody thinks the way he does, and this false universality is due simply to an absence of the sense of limits on his individuality. In this light, egocentrism and solipsism are quite comparable: both stem from the absence or the weakness of the sense of self."

"Every observer has noted that the younger the child, the less sense he has of his own ego. From the intellectual point of view, he does not distinguish between external and internal, subjective and objective. From the point of view of action, he yields to every suggestion, and if he does oppose to other people's wills — a certain negativism which has been called "the spirit of contradiction" — this only points to his real defenselessness against his surroundings. A strong personality can maintain itself without the help of this particular weapon."

"Egocentrism in so far as it means confusion of the ego and the external world, and egocentrism in so far as it means lack of cooperation, constitute one and the same phenomenon. So long as the child does not dissociate his ego from the suggestions coming from the physical and from the social world, he cannot cooperate, for in order to cooperate one must be conscious of one's ego and situate it in relation to thought in general. And in order to become conscious of one's ego, it is necessary to liberate oneself from the thought and will of others. The coercion exercised by the adult or the older child is therefore inseparable from the unconscious egocentrism of the very young child."

"There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism. It may be that the genesis of these experiences is to be sought in the unique situation of the very young child in relation to adults. The theory of the filial origin of the religious sense seems to us singularly convincing in this connection."

"As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires."

"This māyā, that is to say, the ego, is like a cloud. The sun cannot be seen on account of a thin patch of cloud; when that disappears one sees the sun. If by the grace of the guru one's ego vanishes, then one sees God."

"The waves belong to the Ganges, not the Ganges to the waves. A man cannot realize God unless he gets rid of all such egotistic ideas as "I am such an important man" or "I am so and so". Level the mound of "I" to the ground by dissolving it with tears of devotion."

"As a piece of rope, when burnt, retains its form, but cannot serve to bind, so is the ego which is burnt by the fire of supreme Knowledge."

"I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breath air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me."

"The ability to say 'Yes' or 'No' is the essence of all ownership. It's your ownership of your own ego. Your soul, if you wish. Your soul has a single basic function — the act of valuing. 'Yes' or 'No,' 'I wish' or 'I do not wish.' You can't say 'Yes' without saying 'I." There's no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours."

"The first right on earth is the right of the ego."

"You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge, they run from it. They spend their lives running."

"As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egoism and altruism. Egoism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism — the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. … Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal — under the threat that sadism was his only alternative."

"The waking consciousness, dear friends, is not the ego. The ego is only that portion of the waking consciousness that deals with physical manipulation."

"Let us also recall the ancient times when, in spite of the fact that masculine egoism always attempted to suppress the achievements of women, there were always some illumined minds that did not submit to this shameful weakness."

"Illusions will not last. Their death is sure, and this alone is certain in their world. It is the ego’s world because of this. What is the ego? But a dream of what you really are. A thought you are apart from your Creator and a wish to be what He created not. It is a thing of madness, not reality at all. A name for namelessness is all it is. A symbol of impossibility; a choice for options that do not exist... The ego’s unreality is not denied by words nor is its meaning clear because its nature seems to have a form. Who can define the undefinable? And yet there is an answer even here. We cannot really make a definition for what the ego is, but we can say what it is not. And this is shown to us with perfect clarity. It is from this that we deduce all that the ego is. Look at its opposite and you can see the only answer that is meaningful. The ego’s opposite in every way, – in origin, effect and consequence – we call a miracle. And here we find all that is not the ego in the world. Here is the ego’s opposite and here alone we look on what the ego was. For here we see all that it seemed to do, and cause and its effects must still be one. Where there was darkness now we see the light. What was the ego? What the darkness was. Where was the ego? Where the darkness was."

"The ego believes that to accomplish its goal is happiness... Recognize only that the ego’s goal, which you have pursued quite diligently, has merely brought you fear, and it becomes difficult to maintain that fear is happiness. Upheld by fear, this is what the ego would have you believe. p. 10"

"Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver rather than a creator. Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are. Yet you can know yourself only as you are, because that is all you can be sure of. Everything else is open to question. p 16"

"You can speak from the spirit or from the ego, as you choose. If you speak from spirit you have chosen to "Be still and know that I am God." These words are inspired because they reflect knowledge. If you speak from the ego you are disclaiming knowledge instead of affirming it, and are thus dis-spiriting yourself. Do not embark on useless journeys, because they are indeed in vain. The ego may desire them, but spirit cannot embark on them because it is forever unwilling to depart from its Foundation... The ego is afraid of the spirit's joy, because once you have experienced it you will withdraw all protection from the ego, and become totally without investment in fear. Your investment is great now because fear is a witness to the separation, and your ego rejoices when you witness to it. Leave it behind! Do not listen to it and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, Who is as incapable of deception as is the spirit He created. Release yourself and release others. Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourself to others, and do not accept such a picture of them yourself."

"The distractions of the ego may seem to interfere with your learning, but the ego has no power to distract you unless you give it the power to do so... The ego's voice is an hallucination. You cannot expect it to say "I am not real." Yet you are not asked to dispel your hallucinations alone. You are merely asked to evaluate them in terms of their results to you. If you do not want them on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for you... Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does deprive you of peace. Yet in this war there is no opponent. This is the reinterpretation of reality that you must make to secure peace, and the only one you need ever make. Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your peace, which you are giving up by attacking them. How can you have what you give up? You share to have, but you do not give it up yourself."

"Bourgeois morality tries to maintain an illusion of altruism, whereas in all other areas bourgeois thinking has long since assumed a theoretical as well as an economic egocentrism."

"Psychologically speaking, enlightenment always meant an advance in the training of mistrust — in the construction of an ego concerned about self-assertion and control of reality. Freud’s methodology can be summarized, in a way, as the attempt to keep the path to the unconscious open without using hypnosis. One may consider whether, in Freud’s procedure, a finesse born of mistrust is not at work."

"The subject of a radical ego enlightenment cannot be socially identified with certainty — even though the procedures of this enlightenment are anchored in reality. In this point, the majority of societies seem to strive for a conscious nonenlightenment."

"Crosswise to all political fronts, it is the “ego” in society that offers the most resolute resistance against the decisive enlightenment. Scarcely anyone will put up with radical self-reflection on this point, not even many of those who regard themselves as enlighteners."

"As the political ego strives for hardness and agility, it is trained in the way of seeing of generals and diplomats: reconnoiter the terrain; coldly consider the given circumstances; survey the numbers; tack as long as necessary; strike as soon as the time is right. … In this cold romanticism of grand strategic overviews, the political camps of the Left and the Right are quite close to each other. These realpolitik ways of thinking now penetrate down to the person on the street. This "sovereign" thinking, borrowed stateman's optics and general's disposition work on posturingly, even in the minds of the impotent. The principal psychopolitical model of the coming decades is the 'cothinking' cog in the machinery."

"Nowhere does an ego experience it-"self" in modern scientific knowledge. Where this ego still bends over itself, with its obvious tendency to a worldless inwardness, it leaves reality behind. Thus, for present-day thinking, inwardness and outwardness, subjectivity and things, have been split into "alien worlds"; at the same time, the classical premise of philosophizing falls away. "Know thyself" has long since been understood by modern people as an invitation to an ego trip for an escapist ignorance. Modern reflection expressly renounces any competency in embedding subjectivities without rupture into objective worlds. What it uncovers is rather the gulf between both."

"Everything which the ego is able to unfold within itself must give birth to love."

"To have ego means to believe in your own strength. And to also be open to other people's views. It is to be open, not closed. So, yes, my ego is big, but it's also very small in some areas. My ego is responsible for my doing what I do — bad or good."

"You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection - you cannot cope with the future. Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course."

"Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong - defending the mental position with which you have identified - is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die."

"Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet. What do you think will happen on this planet if human consciousness remains unchanged? Already for most humans, the only respite they find from their own minds is to occasionally revert to a level of consciousness below thought. Everyone does that every night during sleep. But this also happens to some extent through sex, alcohol, and other drugs that suppress excessive mind activity. If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others. These drugs, of course, simply keep you stuck in dysfunction. Their widespread use only delays the breakdown of the old mind structures and the emergence of higher consciousness. While individual users may get some relief from the daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so find true liberation."

"Things are changing rapidly now. With many people becoming more conscious, the ego is losing its hold on the human mind."

"Peace, after all, is the end of the ego. How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which he game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance. p. 71"

"Because the ego was never as deeply rooted in woman, it is losing its hold on women more quickly than on men."

"As the egoic mode of consciousness and all the social, political, and economic structures that it created enter the final stage of collapse, the relationships between men and women reflect the deep state of crisis in which humanity now finds itself. As humans have become increasingly identified with their mind, most relationships are not rooted in Being and so turn into a source of pain and become dominated by problems and conflict."

"That sense of pride, of needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of one’s self through “more than” and diminishment through “less than” is neither right nor wrong – it is the ego. The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego. p. 28"

"When the ego is at war, know that it is no more than an illusion that is fighting to survive. That illusion thinks it is you. It is not easy at first to be there as the witnessing Presence, especially when the ego is in survival mode or some emotional pattern from the past has become activated, but once you have had a taste of it, you will grow in Presence power, and the ego will lose its grip on you. And so a power comes into your life that is far greater than the ego, greater than the mind. All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose is to bring that power into this world. And this is also why becoming free of the ego cannot be made into a goal to be attained at some point in the future. Only Presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be present Now, not yesterday or tomorrow. only Presence can undo the past in you and thus transform your state of consciousness. p. 50"

"There are many subtle but easily overlooked forms of ego that you may observe in other people and, more important, in yourself. Remember: The moment you become aware of the go in yourself, that emerging awareness is who you are beyond ego, the deeper “I.” The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real. For example, you are about to tell someone the news of what happened. “Guess what? You don't know yet? Let me tell you.” If you are alert enough, present enough, you may be able to detect a momentary sense of satisfaction within yourself just before imparting the news, even if it is bad news. It is due to the fact that for a brief moment there is, in the eyes of the ego, an imbalance in your favor between you and the other person. For that brief moment, you know more than the other. The satisfaction that you feel is of the ego, and it is derived from feeling a stronger sense of self relative to the other person. p. 52"

"Nobody knows the exact figure because records were not kept, but it seems certain that during a three hundred year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the “Holy Inquisition,“ an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy. This sure ranks together with the Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake. The sacred feminine was declared demonic, and an entire dimension largely disappeared from human experience. Other cultures and religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, also suppressed the female dimension, although in a less violent way. Women's status was reduced to being child bearers and men's property. Males who denied the feminine even within themselves were now running the world, a world that was totally out of balance. The rest is history or rather a case history of insanity... The female form is less rigidly encapsulated than the male, has greater openness and sensitivity toward other lifeforms, and is more attuned to the natural world... If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet, the ego's growth would have been greatly curtailed. We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our Being."

"Until now, human intelligence, which is no more than a minute aspect of universal intelligence, has been distorted and misused by the ego. I call that “intelligence in the service of madness.” Splitting the atom requires great intelligence. Using that intelligence for building and stockpiling atom bombs is insane or at best extremely unintelligent. Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous. This intelligent stupidity, for which one could find countless obvious examples, is threatening our survival as a species."

"The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self interest, and it is extremely shortsighted. Most politicians and business people are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is shortlived and always turns out to be eventually self defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence unites."

"An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, the ego as it thinks, speaks and acts, as well as the recognition of the collectively conditioned mental processes that perpetuate the unawakened state. That is why this book shows the main aspects of the ego and how they operate in the individual as well as in the collective. This is important for two related reasons: The first is that unless you know the basic mechanics behind the workings of the ego, you won’t recognize it, and it will trick you into identifying with it again and again. This means it takes you over, an impostor pretending to be you. The second reason is that the act of recognition itself is one of the ways in which awakening happens. When you recognize the unconsciousness in you, that which makes the recognition possible is the arising consciousness, is awakening. You cannot fight against the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light."

"We are witnessing not only an unprecedented influx of consciousness at this time but also an entrenchment and intensification of the ego. Some religious institutions will be open to the new consciousness; others will harden their doctrinal positions and become part of all those other manmade structures through which the collective ego will defend itself and “fight back.”...But the ego is destined to dissolve, and all its ossified structures, whether they be religious or other institutions, corporations, or governments, will disintegrate from within, no matter how deeply entrenched they appear to be. The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first. This has already happened in the case of Soviet Communism... All were taken by surprise. There are many more such surprises in store for us."

"Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality – and it has a relative, not an absolute, reality – this is also its definition: complete identification with form – physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in a total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every “other” as well as with the Source."

"Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet."

"In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a prediction that to this day few people have understood. He says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5, New Revised Standard Version). In modern versions of the Bible, “meek” is translated as humble. Who are the meek or the humble, and what does it mean that they shall inherit the earth? The meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in all “others,” all lifeforms. They live in the surrendered state and so feel their oneness with the whole and the Source. They embody the awakened consciousness that is changing all aspects of life on our planet, including nature, because life on earth is inseparable from the human consciousness that perceives and interacts with it. That is the sense in which the meek will inherit the earth."

"The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East — in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe."

"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin."

"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."

"If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God."

"Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word "water" is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism."

"The Saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The Sage is a man who rids himself of his ego."

"There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realising its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being."

"At this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the "edge of history." There would be a real New Age."

"The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance — the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic)."

"The real problem is how to get people to internally transform, from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely, even eagerly, embrace global solutions."

"Put bluntly, there is an archaic God, a magic God, a mythic God, a mental God, and an integral God. Which God do you believe in? An archaic God sees divinity in any strong instinctual force. A magic God locates divine power in the human ego and its magical capacity to change the animistic world with rituals and spells. A mythic God is located not on this earth but in a heavenly paradise not of this world, entrance to which is gained by living according to the covenants and rules given by this God to his peoples. A mental God is a rational God, a demythologized Ground of Being that underlies all forms of existence. And an integral God is one that embraces all of the above. Which of those Gods is the most important? According to an integral view, all of them, because each "higher" stage actually builds upon and includes the lower, so the lower stages are more fundamental and the higher stages are more significant, but leave out any one of them and you're in trouble. You are, that is, less than integral, less than comprehensive, less than inclusive in your understanding of God."

"Resist the pressure to conform. Better be a lonely individualist than a contented conformist."

"The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness."

"That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong... is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct."

"Not only psychiatry itself but also the values reflected in its statistical definition of “normalcy” serve to condition men to habitual, unthinking, conformist behavior."

"There is a socialization which turns curious children into adult automatons in a social environment of repressive uniformity, and there is a socialization which turns selfish, impulsive children into self-aware and deliberate participants in a larger community."

"Even though no one else discovers the nonconformity or enforces the rules against it, the individual who has committed the impropriety may himself act as the enforcer. He may brand himself as deviant because of what he has done and punish himself in one way or another for his behavior."

"The common denominator between all my cartoons is rebellion against blind conformity."

"The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity."

"Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current “role models.” They are constantly thinking of themselves in terms of fixed standards that they did not make. Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Moses or Romulus, they unconsciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen or TV personalities around them. One can only pity young people without admirations they can respect or avow, who are artificially restrained from the enthusiasm for great virtue."

"Socrates too thought that living according to the opinions of others was an illness. But he did not urge men to look for a source for producing their own unique opinions, or criticize them for being conformists. His measure of health was not sincerity, authenticity or any of the other necessarily vague criteria for distinguishing a healthy self. The truth is the one thing most needful; and conforming to nature is quite different from conforming to law, convention or opinion."

"Tocqueville found that Americans talked very much about individual right but that there was a real monotony of thought and that vigorous independence of mind was rare. Even those who appear to be free-thinkers … are creatures of public opinion as much as are conformists—actors of nonconformism in the theater of the conformists who admire and applaud nonconformity of certain kinds, the kinds that radicalize the already dominant opinions."

"Let's all be different same as me."

"I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideals."

"To make everything yield to custom would be to do the greatest injustice. Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error."

"Be it so that public error must have a place in human society, still, in the kingdom of God, we must look and listen only to his eternal truth, against which no series of years, no custom, no conspiracy, can plead prescription. Thus Isaiah formerly taught the people of God, “Say ye not, A confederacy, to all to whom this people shall say, A confederacy;” i.e. do not unite with the people in an impious consent."

"The person who is in an infantile level is the person who is apolitical and conformist … the person who replaces the private father with the social anonymous father."

"To make more products for people who wanted to express themselves would mean creating variety. But the systems of mass production that had been developed in America were only profitable if they made large numbers of the same objects. This had fitted perfectly with the limited range of desires of a conformist society. The expressive self threatened this whole system of manufacturing."

"When modern men and women insist that they feel completely free in their work, they are in a sense telling the truth, for the triumph of conformity lies in the crushing of all resistance, all experience of conflict."

"In order to be able to be an irreproachable member of the herd, one must, above all, be a sheep."

"Revelation … unavoidably challenges the institution and established power, no matter what form this may take. But the adulteration by political power has changed all this. Christianity has become a religion of conformity."

"Conformity is the ape of harmony."

"These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. … Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. … The virtue in most request is conformity. … Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist... must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness."

"Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right."

"The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing."

"Yield not one inch to all the forces which conspire to make you an echo."

"I would prefer to speak openly and like an oracle to give answers serviceable to all mankind, even though no one should understand me, rather than to conform to popular opinions and so win the praise freely scattered by the mob."

"Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil."

"“But,” said Emma, “ one must, after all, follow, to a certain extent, the opinion of the world and conform to its morality.” “Ah! but then there are two moralities. The petty, the conventional one, that of men, that which varies unceasingly and bawls so loudly, that one grovels below, close to the earth, like this assembly of idiots which you behold. But the other, the eternal, is all around and above us, like the landscape that encircles us and the blue heaven that gives us light.”"

"There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either fighting against this tendency or giving in to it."

"I made no attempt to conceal the tedium of these encounters. “They’re all alike,” I told her, “and each repeats the next. Whenever I talk to one, it seems to me I’m talking to several.” “But my dear,” Marceline answered, “you can’t ask each one to be different from all the rest.” “The more they’re like each other, the less they’re like me.” And I continued more wearily: … “They’re alive, they seem to be alive and not to know it.”"

"Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system, and to have skillful and spirited men to man that system with."

"The Prophet is essentially a one-sided man. A certain moral idea fills his whole being, masters his every feeling and sensation, engrosses his whole attention. He can only see the world through the mirror of his idea; he desires nothing, strives for nothing, except to make every phase of the life around him an embodiment of that idea in its perfect form. His whole life is spent in fighting for this ideal with all his strength; for its sake he lays waste his powers, unsparing of himself, regardless of the conditions of life and the demands of the general harmony. His gaze is fixed always on what ought to be in accordance with his own convictions; never on what can be consistently with the general condition of things outside himself. ...The Prophet is thus a primal force. His action affects the character of the general harmony, while he him self does not become a part of that harmony, but remains always a man apart, a narrow-minded extremist, zealous for his own ideal, and intolerant of every other. And since he cannot have all that he would, he is in a perpetual state of anger and grief; he remains all his life "a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth." [Jeremiah 15:10] Not only this: the other members of society, those many-sided dwarfs, creatures of the general harmony, cry out after him, "The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad" [Hosea 9:7]; and they look with lofty contempt on his narrowness and extremeness."

"It is the average man of today who shows the most striking differences from people of other ages and civilizations. The rebel of today is twin brother of rebels in all ages and climes."

"The majority principle … has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform."

"Young men are pretty much like a drove of sheep; any one who takes a decided line on certain matters, is sure to lead all the rest."

"The majority of people want to be like others, and this drives them to a death in life. It is necessary to find what distinguishes us from others in order to be something. To the extent that we try to be like others, we convert ourselves into zombies."

"Καὶ ἤκουσα ἄλλην φωνὴν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ λέγουσαν Ἐξέλθατε ὁ λαός μου ἐξ αὐτῆς, ἵνα μὴ συνκοινωνήσητε ταῖς ἁμαρτίαις αὐτῆς."

"The more a man's life is shaped by the collective norms, the greater is his individual immorality."

"Fear … explains not only conformity to the behavior of others … but also the adoption of the valuations of others. First, people behave as if these valuations were their own, too, because they are afraid not to conform; then they get used to this pretense and “it becomes second nature.” … As children, we do not conform because the judgment of our elders is likely to be more rational than ours, but—according to Nietzsche—merely from impotence and fear."

"Nietzsche [in The Gay Science § 143] denounced monotheism for preaching the existence of one Normalgott as a single norm which suggests somehow that there is also a Normalmensch: a norm to which all men must conform and a bar to the development of individuality. It was the advantage of polytheism, Nietzsche contends, that it allowed for a “multiplicity of norms.” (Gay Science § 143)"

"If your ultimate and highest goal is to have life made easy and sociable, then never become involved with Christianity, shun it, because it wants the very opposite; it wants to make your life difficult and to do this by making you alone before God. No earnest person, therefore, wearies of tracking down the illusions, because insofar as he is a thinking person he fears most to be in error, however cozy the arrangement is, however good the company—and as a Christian he fears most to be lost without knowing it—however flattering, however splendid the surroundings and the company are."

"The most pernicious of all evasions is—hidden in the crowd, to want, as it were, to avoid God’s inspection of oneself as a single individual, as Adam once did when his bad conscience fooled him into thinking that he could hide among the trees."

"We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man. But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist."

"The extent to which the attitude approved by the herd is fixed by such agencies for imposing conformity as the Public Schools, advertising and the Press, cannot be overestimated. It is more than difficult, it is next to impossible, for the ordinary uncritical man to resist when, whichever way he looks in the street, from poster and hoarding, and advertising in bus and tramcar, whichever paper or novel he picks up, whatever play or film he attends for amusement, the pressure of the herd is brought to bear on him."

"Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals."

"The common individual always conforms to the prevailing opinion and the prevailing fashion; he regards the state in which everything now exists as the only possible one and passively accepts it all. … To the genius it always occurs to ask: Could this too not be false?"

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society."

"Though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it."

"I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of. … Peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own."

"A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat?"

"Tendencies of the time cause the public to be more disposed than at most former periods to prescribe general rules of conduct, and endeavor to make every one conform to the approved standard. And that standard, express or tacit, is to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character; to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady’s foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently, and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity."

"As the various social eminences which enabled persons entrenched on them to disregard the opinion of the multitude, gradually become levelled; as the very idea of resisting the will of the public, when it is positively known that they have a will, disappears more and more from the minds of practical politicians; there ceases to be any social support for non-conformity—any substantive power in society, which, itself opposed to the ascendancy of numbers, is interested in taking under its protection opinions and tendencies at variance with those of the public."

"Wartime measures typically encourage a high degree of political, social and intellectual conformity. The general idea is that, in the face of an existential challenge from a vicious enemy, ought to cease."

"Sins which would terrify us if they were peculiar to ourselves alone cease to frighten us when they are shared. The sinner sleeps soundly when he finds himself surrounded by a multitude, as though God were obliged to spare him."

"In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. ... Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle."

"There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. ... He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes."

"The mass is all that which sets no value on itself—good or ill—based on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like everybody,” and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else."

"The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves."

"Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."

"Pythagoras teaches among other excellent doctrines this also, “walk not on the highways.” This does not mean that we should climb steep hills—the school was not prescribing foot-weariness—but it indicates by this figure that in our words and deeds we should not follow popular and beaten tracks."

"I would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself."

"[While] there are worldly singularities, there are Christian and salutary ones, too; and this singularity by which one is differentiated from the crowd who tread the broad path is what constitutes the straight and narrow path of the Gospels. ... Holy things will never be established or reestablished so long as we have this fear of appearing singular."

"A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought of his neighbor."

"These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity."

"Path: where nothing grows."

"The position which I had taken up aroused curiosity; people were anxious to make the acquaintance of the singular man, who sought no one’s society, and whose only anxiety was to live free and happy after his own fashion. Thrown, in spite of myself, into the great world, without possessing its manners, and unable to acquire or conform to them, I took it into my head to adopt manners of my own, which might enable me to dispense with them."

"We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think — in fact they do so."

"Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd."

"Man is the only being which can lay claim to possess an individual character. But in most men this individual character comes to very little in reality; and they may be almost all ranged under certain classes: ce sont des espèces. Their thoughts and desires, like their faces, are those of the species, or, at any rate, those of the class to which they belong; and accordingly, they are of a trivial, every-day, common character, and exist by the thousand. You can usually tell beforehand what they are likely to do and say. They have no special stamp or mark to distinguish them; they are like manufactured goods, all of a piece."

"There is nothing that brings greater trouble on us than the fact that we conform to rumor, thinking that what has won widespread approval is best, and that, as we have so many to follow as good, we live by the principle, not of reason, but of imitation."

"Inwardly everything should be different but our outward face should conform to the crowd."

"[It would seem that] you must inevitably either hate or imitate the world. But the right thing is to shun both courses: you should neither become like the bad because they are many, nor be an enemy of the many because they are unlike you."

"Scorn the pleasure that comes from the majority’s approval. The many speak highly of you, but have you really any grounds for satisfaction with yourself if you are the kind of person the many understand?"

"Conformity is a mood and an atmosphere, a failure of hope or belief or rebellion."

"What is it about us, the public, and what is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?"

"Men must always have distinguished (e.g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one’s own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters—the first things and the right way—the only source of knowledge was hearsay."

"I don't want to waste my time; become another casualty of society. I'll never fall in line; become another victim of your conformity and back down."

"[S]chools are places of intense conformity. Fear of exclusion cripples and terrorizes its young victims; often you can see it on their faces. They do and think what they’re told. They even protest as they’re told. Some rebellion."

"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior."

"The moral empire of the majority is founded in part of the idea that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in many men united than in one alone, in the number of legislators than in their choice. It is the theory of equality applied to intellects."

"The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence."

"The fact that the political laws of the Americans are such that the majority rules the community with sovereign sway materially increases the power which that majority naturally exercises over the mind. For nothing is more customary in man than to recognize superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor."

"Stephan Arkadievich chose neither his attitudes nor his opinions, no, the attitudes and opinions came to him on their own, just as he chose neither the style of his hat nor of his coats but got what people were wearing."

"For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment. … Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society)."

"While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free."

"The murmur of a people hath strange weight."

"In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4–H Club—the "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history"."

"Public opinion is no more than this, What people think that other people think."

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

"A public opinion poll will not get you rich on Wall Street."

"When the People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one."

"Sure 'tis an orthodox opinion, That grace is founded in dominion."

"Human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error."

"Be it so that public error must have a place in human society, still, in the kingdom of God, we must look and listen only to his eternal truth, against which no series of years, no custom, no conspiracy, can plead prescription. Thus Isaiah formerly taught the people of God, "Say ye not, A confederacy, to all to whom this people shall say, A confederacy;" i.e. do not unite with the people in an impious consent."

"Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion."

"In part, again, these changes are unconscious. Public opinion is formed and expressed by machinery. The newspapers do an immense amount of thinking for the average man and woman. In fact they supply them with such a continuous stream of standardized opinion, borne along upon an equally inexhaustible flood of news and sensation, collected from every part of the world every hour of the day, that there is neither the need nor the leisure for personal reflection. All this is but a part of a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial. It produces enormous numbers of standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party. It may eventually lead to a reasonable, urbane and highly serviceable society. It may draw in its wake a mass culture enjoyed by countless millions to whom such pleasures were formerly unknown. We must not forget the enormous circulations at cheap prices of the greatest books of the world, which is a feature of modern life in civilized countries, and nowhere more than in the United States. But this great diffusion of knowledge, information and light reading of all kinds may, while it opens new pleasures to humanity and appreciably raises the general level of intelligence, be destructive of those conditions of personal stress and mental effort to which the masterpieces of the human mind are due."

"Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature. I see that a speaker at the week-end said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture."

"I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man—public opinion."

"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy, is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority. [...] Evidently we have not advanced very far from the condition that confronted Wendell Phillips. Today, as then, public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant."

"Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all."

"Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent."

"The great masses, who have never been, in the history of mankind, more subject to hypnotic suggestion than they are right now, have become the puppets of the “public opinion” that is engineered by the newspapers in the service, it need hardly be emphasized, of the reigning powers of finance. What is printed in the morning editions of the big city newspapers is the opinion of nine out of ten readers by nightfall. The United States of America, whose more rapid “progress” enables us to predict the future on a daily basis, has pulled far ahead of the pack when it comes to standardizing thought, work, entertainment, etc."

"In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

"Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fears. It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans."

"Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which ... can be called “public” or “popular” opinion."

"In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law."

"The practice of democracy has the notorious tendency to become paradoxical. It begins in the name of the "demos" but goes on to construct the demos rather narrowly; oftentimes, sections of the population manage to ensconce themselves as "the people", they count as the public, their ideas masquerade as the people's ideas."

"Great religious leaders are more interesting and more important subjects for the dramatist than great conquerors. It is a misfortune that public opinion would not tolerate a dramatization of Mahomet in Constantinople. But to prohibit it here, where public opinion would tolerate it, is an absurdity which, if applied in all directions, would make it impossible for the Queen to receive a Turkish ambassador without veiling herself, or the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's to display a cross on the summit of their Cathedral in a city occupied largely and influentially by Jews."

"Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions."

"Private opinion creates public opinion. Public opinion overflows eventually into national behaviour and national behaviour, as things are arranged at present, can make or mar the world. That is why private opinion, and private behaviour, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important."

"What news? Ma foi! The tiger has broken out of his den. The monster was three days at sea. The wretch has landed at Fréjus. The Brigand has arrived at Antibes. The Invader has reached Grenoble. The General has entered Lyons. Napoleon slept last night at Fontainebleau. The Emperor proceeds to the Tuileries to-day. His Imperial Majesty will address his loyal subjects to-morrow."

"No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen's unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aerial navigation; but a change in public opinion. And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think."

"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God."

"Je connais quelqu'un qui a plus d'esprit que Napoléon, que Voltaire, que tous les ministres présents et futurs: c'est l'opinion."

"…new religious movements often grow not through dramatic revelations but through the quiet fatigue of every day."

"Perhaps one should start by asking 'what is a new religion?' I believe that too precise a definition is constraining and unnecessary for our present purposes; several of the movements about which we shall be talking are not obviously new or religions. … many associated with the New Age or the so-called Human Potential movement, who deny that they are in any way religious. These may, however, be included in so far as they help their followers to search for, discover and develop 'the god within' or to get in contact with cosmic forces, or explore 'the spiritual'; indeed, any movement that offers in some way to provide answers to some of the ultimate questions about 'meaning' and 'the purpose of life' that have traditionally been addressed by mainstream religions would be included in this broad understanding of the term 'NRM'.")"

"The majority of NRMs are, however, not indigenous to Europe. Several of the movements came from Asia, mainly India (; ; ; [later called ]; , ; ; ; and various practices associated with , , and other types of ), but also from Japan (; ; ; ; ); Korea (the ); and other parts of Asia ( from Vietnam; from Taiwan; from China). There are also groups from the Caribbean () and Africa ( and ; the ), most of these finding their home among the black populations residing in Europe. Another development has been the growth of a number of Islamic groups (; the ; ; )."

"While the contribution of traditional religions to earthquake relief is generally acknowledged, social prejudice makes it more difficult to recognize the good work of new religious movements."

"'New religious movement' is a maddeningly vague designation, of course, and definable in infinite ways... a helpful definition comes from the British sociologist George D. Chryssides. According to Chryssides, a new religious movement is one that is 'recent' (which for him means something from the nineteenth century or later), falls outside the 'mainstream', and primarily attracts converts from within the broader culture."

"China seems to have been very much similar to the West, both in the production of new religious movements and in attracting to them figures from the political left who were officially promoting the struggle against “superstition.” Reconstructions of “Chinese traditional culture” as “non-religious,” and of the rich Chinese religious pluralism as mere “folk religion” should be viewed as propaganda rather than history."

"Even, or especially, when it initially is successful, internal conflicts over basic goals and beliefs, leadership, and organizational forms commonly threaten the very existence of a new religious movement. These internal conflicts frequently result in schisms (organizational splinters) that severely weaken the new movement, resulting in a loss of basic resources and significant decline."

"In both countries, Taiwan and Poland, the newly established democratic systems resulted in the development of associations and other civic initiatives, but also in the emergence of new religious and spiritual groups. In both countries religious liberty was officially proclaimed in late 1980s. Yet, in Poland, the initial thaw and ease of registering new religious communities significantly slowed down over the years, and currently—for various reasons—registering a new group is more challenging than three decades ago. Previously, the political climate made similar activities difficult, various groups operated unregistered, and everything was monitored by the secret security services."

"These two opposing strategies of new religious movements for delivering compensators I will term 'compensation delivery systems' (CDS). The gradual CDS can best be described as religion as a multi-level marketing (MLM) tactic - a term I take from the business world."

"New religions are like weeds in our garden. Society’s gardeners will attempt to pull out weeds to make room for cultured plants and familiar religions. However, some weeds may be cherished flowers in other lands, and those deemed “invasive” might be edible or have healing properties."

"The largest group of New Religious Movements – both in numbers of individual groups within it and in the diffused range of its overall influence within modern British life – is that clustered around the richly varied collection of 'self-religions', psychotherapies and New Age mysticism and alternative spiritualities. This large group may be broadly divided into two sub-groups, each of which is simply a clustering of often quite diverse movements around a similar overall theme. The first group consists of the 'self-religions' and religiously 'flavoured' psycho-therapies which have increasingly fluorished in the last twenty or thirty years. The self-religions have been characterized as 'movements which exemplify the conjunction of the exploration of the self and the search for significance'."

"Many of the new religions attract individuals by the promise of peace of mind, spiritual well-being, gratifying experiences, and material success. In doing so they stress their concern for the individual and highlight one's personal worth and self-development."

"Some of these terms, including "cult" and "sect," have long traditions of use, stretching back to the centuries when Latin was the official language of scholars. But the meanings of words often change over time; and terms that once were neutral or simply descriptive sometimes take on harshly negative implications and potentially lose their original usefulness, including the two just mentioned. Other terms have been coined more recently to circumvent the stereotypes associated with older categories. Among this newer terminology are "outsider groups" and "New Religious Movements." Sometimes the newer nomenclature is useful despite certain limitations. "Marginal religious communities," for example, is a positional designation — not a qualitative judgment — implying a location on the margin or edge of mainstream religious groups. When using these terms, it is important to recognize that they are often loaded with powerful assumptions and implications."

"A second variety of new religion that began to flourish during the 1960s consisted of the various groups, techniques and spiritual disciplines which came to be known collectively as the 'human potential movement'. In some ways, the human potential movement was an offshoot of the encounter group movement which flourished on college campuses during the 1960s (Back, 1972) and of popular psychology which had blossomed in a good many minds since the heyday of Fulton Sheen and Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s."

"Landmark Education, as it's formally known, is hardly alone. There are any number of groups that foster change in an intense, supportive environment. Formally, they are gathered under the rubric 'large group awareness training.' A few groups are relatively new. some have been around for decades. Almost all owe a major debt to a Unity minister named Alexander Everett."

"A large group awareness training (LGAT) program is a personal development training program in which dozens to hundreds of people are given several hours to several days of intense instruction aimed at helping participants begin to discover what is hindering them from achieving their full potential and living more satisfied lives."

"LGAT gurus claim to know how to help people become more creative, intelligent, healthy, and rich. They focus primarily on the role interpersonal communication plays in self-esteem and in defining our relationships with others."

"These gurus might all take the one-size-fits-all cookie cutter approach to self-help, but the founders of such programs as est, Landmark Forum, neuro-linguistic programming, Tony Robbins seminars, Impact Training, MJB Seminars, Silva Mind Control, Dr. Demartini, Bryon Katie, PSI Seminars, Mind Dynamics (the daddy of them all), Lifespring, Hoffman Quadrinity, Complete Centering, etc., use their own unique cookie cutters."

"Though some advocate visualization, self-hypnosis, and other techniques for achieving self-realization, most LGAT programs focus on communication skills and the effect of language on thought and behavior. Those running the programs must excel in those skills. The trainers are motivators."

"Landmark Forum is a large group awareness training program in which up to 150 people take a seminar together aimed at helping them realize their true potential."

"est and Large-Group Awareness Seminars: Arising out of the human potential movement in the 1960s were a number of workshops, seminars and training programs. The most famous human potential program was erhard seminars training known as est. est was an intensive 60-hour workshop designed to alter a person's life view. There are a number of est clones including Life Spring, Actualizations and Forum, which is a successor to est. All of these workshops have several features in common. Participants are verbally attacked. The idea is to break down emotional defenses in order to allow new beliefs and attitudes to take over. There is a significant cathartic element in that emotional release is generated by the est techniques."

"The short-term outcome analyses revealed that only perceived control was affected by Forum participation, and no long-term treatment effects were observed. Results suggest that claims about far-reaching positive or negative psychological effects of participation in LGATs such as the Forum may be exaggerated."

"Since their initiation, LGATs have been the subject of much controversy. While LGAT supporters argue that such interventions are vehicles for personal growth and societal change and are a cost-effective means of introducing beneficial therapeutic messages to large audiences (Berger, 1977; Erhard & Gioscia, 1978; Shaw, 1977), others view them as a hazardous and irresponsible use of powerful psychological principles and psychotherapeutic procedures (see, e.g., Brewer, 1975; Rome, 1977)."

"LGATs generally focus on philosophical, psychological, and ethical issues related to personal effectiveness, decision making, personal responsibility, and commitment. These issues are examined through lectures, demonstrations, dialogue with participants, structured exercises, and participants' testimonials of personal experiences relevant to the themes presented. Participants are encouraged to apply the insights they obtain to improving their own lives."

"More direct evidence comes from a careful study of Large Group Awareness Training programs, variously known as Erhard Seminars Training (est), Lifespring, or simply the Forum. The basic procedure of these courses parallels the group training workshops … but the emphasis shifts from group effectiveness to personal development. By talking through life challenges, aspirations, fears, and the like with fellow participants and professional counselors/teachers, individuals hope to change how they view themselves, their family and friends, and their prospects for a fulfilling life."

"In the most rigorous independent study to date, a team of researchers led by psychologist Jeffrey Fisher obtained permission to study the impact of participation in a training process sponsored by Werner Erhard and Associates. The investigators assembled a sample of eighty-three people who took part in the Forum, along with fifty-two comparison groups of nonparticipants with comparable baseline characteristics. Fisher and his team assessed the Forum participant's traits and beliefs four to six weeks before taking part in the Forum, four to six weeks afterward, and eighteen months later. Based on the wide range of the Forum's purported benefits, Fisher's surveys measured life satisfaction, social competence, self-esteem, physical and emotional health, and a variety of character traits. In the short term, average Forum participants experienced a small but significant increase in their sense that the course of their life was under their own control—what psychologists call an 'internal locus of control.' In the eighteen-month follow-up, however, even this slight boost had disappeared and no other changes emerged. This suggests that even when participants subjectively sense self-transformation through a group process such as the Forum, one may not actually have occurred."

"Prospective participants in The Forum, which has been classified as an LGAT, were compared with nonparticipating peers and with available normative samples on measures of well-being, negative life events, social support, and philosophical orientation. Results revealed that prospective participants were significantly more distressed than peer and normative samples of community residents and had a higher level of impact of recent negative life events compared with peer (but not normative) samples."

"The data suggest that prospective LGAT participants can be distinguished from their peers and community samples along two primary dimensions: higher levels of psychological distress and a belief in a set of values that includes self-responsibility and self-awareness."

"The LGAT participants also appeared to have a somewhat higher level of impact of recent negative life events compared with the peer nominees but not compared with the normative sample."

"One factor distinguishing prospective LGAT participants from nominees was their level of psychological distress. Overall, the data indicate that Forum participants were more distressed than the nominees and a community sample yet were less distressed than a clinical outpatient population."

"Taken together, the ability of distress and philosophical orientation to distinguish prospective LGAT participants from non-participants suggests a tentative model for explaining LGAT participation. Whereas psychological distress or dissatisfaction with current circumstances may be what motivates individuals to seek an available change activity, the kinds of values and worldviews held by individuals may steer them toward a specific change modality (e.g., an LGAT)."

"Dennison's dissertation, which categorizes the Landmark Forum as a 'large group awareness training' is a qualitative study based on interviews with Forum graduates. He also reports predominantly positive outcomes and in addition, briefly summarizes philosophical components of the Forum."

"The extensive research literature on 'large group awareness training' published in the 1970s and 80s (summarized in Finkelstein, Wenegrat, and Yalom) is framed in psychological more than philosophical terms, albeit there is some reference to the training as existential psychotherapy."

"Both est and Landmark Forum could be classified as LGATs (large group awareness trainings), a sociological grouping that includes neuro-linguistic programming, Insight Training Seminars (see the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness), and a whole plethora of sales and motivational courses."

"The LGAT format can have advantages, mainly in terms of affordability and the powerful support of being in a crowd of like-minded people. However, they have their critics, who say that they offer a 'one-size-fits-all' approach, where the group leaders make assumptions about clients' problems, and have an excessive focus on defining interpersonal relationships as the central objective in life."

"Between 1971 and 1985, in particular, a number of LGAT groups gained large followings and subsequent notoriety and some are still active in the 1990s. LGAT groups included est and its offshoots such as Transformation Technologies and the Forum (Werner Erhard); Lifespring (John Hanley); Silva Mind Control (Jose Silva); Direct Centering (Gavin Barnes, aka Bayard Hora); Actualizations (Stewart Emery); ONE (Oury Engolz); Life Training (W.R. Whitten and K.B Brown); Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA) and Insight Seminars (John-Roger Hinkins); PSI World (Thomas D. Whilhite); and Arica Institute (Oscar Ichazo). This particular brand of New Age group gained significant access into the business world."

"Religious issues aside, the pronounced psychological nature of many of the exercises within many of these programs is of concern. We cannot deny the fact that they grew out of the highly confrontational group therapy techniques introduced by the encounter, sensitivity, and large group awareness training movements."

"Some of the other procedures used in certain of the large group awareness training (LGAT) programs and their offshoots contain processes to humiliate people (they resemble fraternity hazing events)."

"On federal court orders, I have attended six large group awareness training sessions (sponsored by est, the Forum, Lifespring, and PSI World) and have interviewed dozens of persons who have attended these and such other programs as Silva Mind Control, Actualizations, and Direct Centering, as well as the myriad of other programs now available, some started by former employees and even, on occasion, attendees of the larger well-known LGATs. I have studied the training manuals and videos used to train trainers and have interviewed a number of trainers."

"LGAT programs tend to last at least four days and usually five. They are described as seminars and sound very much like special college courses. The highly confrontational and psychological aspects generally are not mentioned beforehand. Nor it is mentioned that a whole new theory of how the world works will be inculcated in attendees."

"The little research conducted on the outcomes of these seminars doesn't even find them effective at prompting positive change. Most participants find the experience profoundly moving — and many people believe that such an emotionally intense event must necessarily produce psychological improvement. Consequently, an overwhelming majority of participants, when surveyed afterward, say their lives were changed for the better. However, several studies (including one of Lifespring) have found that while participants say their LGAT experiences improve their lives, there was no positive effect, or a small, short-lived one, on their actual psychological problems and behavior."

"The Branch Davidians were a separatist, communal sect of the Seventh Day Adventists that had occupied several buildings and some acreage outside of Waco,Texas. David Koresh, the sect's leader, preached an apocalyptic message of a showdown with government forces."

"The vast majority of groups termed 'sects' by the Government are small organizations with fewer than 100 members. Among the larger groups is the Church of Scientology, with between 5,000 and 6,000 members, and the Unification Church, with approximately 700 adherents throughout the country. Other groups found in the country include Divine Light Mission, Eckankar, Hare Krishna, the Holosophic community, the Osho movement, Sahaja Yoga, Sai Baba, Sri Chinmoy, Transcendental Meditation, Landmark Education, the Center for Experimental Society Formation, Fiat Lux, Universal Life, and The Family."

"The Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Davidians, a religious sect that had split from the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 1930s."

"Jonestown was at heart a religious community, whether classified as a new religious movement, a cult, a sect, or a church."

"Every person who is not a fellow member, and every social, religious and political institution that lies outside the sect's domain, is portrayed as a representative of Satan's world. In our research, we found that Moonies and members of many Christian sects with similar religious and political doctrines often focus on such beliefs to the exclusion of all other thought."

"Now I see there is a people risen that I cannot win with gifts or honours, offices or places; but all other sects and people I can."

"Like Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians approximated the 'apocalyptic sect' as an ideal type."

"As with its disciplinary practices and its round of daily life, the community of goods in the Peoples Temple at Jonestown emphasizes its similarities to otherworldly sects—both the contemporary ones labeled 'cults' by their detractors, and historical examples which are often revered in retrospect by contemporary religious culture."

"I remembered the devotion of those belonging to the Manson 'Family' or the 'People's Temple' of Jim Jones or the Branch Davidian Sect or the 'Heaven's Gate' sect of Marshall Applewhite It wasn't how much the 'Heaven's Gate' believers believed that there was a spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet, waiting to take them to paradise; only the actual existence of such a spaceship really mattered."

"Observers of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple noted that Jones' socialist sect did not lose non-profit status or receive reams of negative publicity until the massacre at Guyana occurred."

"There is an interesting class difference to be found among these apocalyptic sects. The victims at Waco were predominantly from the lower class, as was true of Jonestown. The Heaven's Gate believers, on the other hand, were on the whole from the middle class."

"The Indiana Peoples Temple was essentially a sect, which was joined by new religious movement members in California, which then recruited black church members as it focused its ministry on the residents of urban California."

"To read the website of the Heaven's Gate sect is to enter a world of eternal promise. Among those who are going home for good, there is only 'joy', 'the rapture of the saved', the blissful prophecy of the 'Talmudic sages'."

"The Peoples Temple movement began in the 1950s as an independent Pentecostal congregation of white and black working-class families … Some argue it was initially a Christian sect that then became a new religious movement."

"Despite being a relatively new organization, the Church of Scientology already has had to denounce splinter groups, including sects that claim to practice Dianetics complete with E-Meters independent of the Church."

"Some of these terms, including "cult" and "sect," have long traditions of use, stretching back to the centuries when Latin was the official language of scholars. But the meanings of words often change over time; and terms that once were neutral or simply descriptive sometimes take on harshly negative implications and potentially lose their original usefulness, including the two just mentioned. Other terms have been coined more recently to circumvent the stereotypes associated with older categories. Among this newer terminology are "outsider groups" and "New Religious Movements." Sometimes the newer nomenclature is useful despite certain limitations. "Marginal religious communities," for example, is a positional designation — not a qualitative judgment — implying a location on the margin or edge of mainstream religious groups. When using these terms, it is important to recognize that they are often loaded with powerful assumptions and implications."

"Branch Davidians are a modern religious sect that claims to be an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The church renounced any connection with the sect in the 1930s."

"The Heaven's Gate sect received national attention in the spring of 1997, when its thirty-nine members committed suicide in Southern California."

"Peoples Temple and the Branch Davidians both approximated the 'apocalyptic sect' as an ideal type. In such sects the end of the world is taken as a central tenet."

"Often one person can steel another, and another and another, until many are working together. You don’t have to form a majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking out can sometimes get a school board, a church board, a board of aldermen to reconsider authoritarian actions. Lack of any opposition teaches bullies simply to go for more. But it takes one person, an individual, to start the opposition."

"Republicans in Congress have failed the country more than anyone else. They had several opportunities to rid us and themselves of Trump, but nearly all of them instead crowded together to squeeze into the group photo of Trump’s Blind Mice. John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and a few others have stood up to him, but most have publicly backed him 100 percent. I doubt they do this happily. Most of the GOP candidates who would kiss Trump on both cheeks on the county court house steps on a Saturday afternoon next spring to get his endorsement in the primaries probably wish he would drop dead. He is the biggest RINO of all, having no allegiance to conservative traditions and values unless they served his personal interest. Since 2015 he has spewed as much venom and assassinated as many characters in the Republican ranks as in the Democrats’. Eventually everyone gets attacked, including Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Trump’s own vice-president. That’s why Republican politicians should disown him, and it’s also why they don’t. Some GOP officials want Trump to become the all-powerful king that the framers of the Constitution went to such lengths to prevent, but whether they do or not, almost all of them are scared (insert a vivid gastro-intestinal metaphor here) of the big bully."

"Harry Truman famously said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” and he had a sign on his desk that read, “The buck stops here.” Trump can’t stand the heat, and accordingly he always makes sure the buck stops somewhere else. Like most bullies, he usually gets another person to do his dirty work and face all the danger. The mob who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were the latest version of the throngs who bought Trump’s junk bonds in earlier days, taking all the risks, for his benefit, while he watched."

"Regina Huerter, Director of Juvenile Diversion for the Denver District Attorney's office, compiled a report on Columbine's "toxic culture," as Dylan Klebold's parents later described it. One Jewish student she interviewed told her how jocks threatened to "build an oven and set him on fire," and how, during P.E. basketball, each time someone scored a basket, the bullies would cheer, "that's another Jew in the oven!" The student complained over and over, but, he said, the school administration not only didn't punish the jocks, they "did everything but call me a liar." Another student was physically and verbally abused by a group of jocks so badly that he refused to go back to the school. The father tried contacting the administration, but they didn't return his calls for six weeks, and when they did, they were curt and rude. The father pulled his son from the high school and told Huerter that "he still refuses to enter Columbine property to this day." "All the students with whom I spoke, independent of their status at the school, acknowledged there was bullying," Huerter wrote. Students and parents all complained of Columbine's exceptionally brutal culture, but the administration did nothing about it. Some who worked in the school district told Huerter that they kept mum about the bullying because they were afraid for their jobs. As Brown noted, "The bullies were popular with the administration.""

"Bullying was so deeply ingrained that, as the American Psychology Association Monitor wrote, "Columbine students said teachers and staff did not seem to notice the bullying and aggression; apparently such behaviors were culturally normative." Here again is a perfect, modern example of how what is considered normal is not only tolerated, but is simply not seen, no matter how brutal it is. From this example, it's a little easier to understand how whites accepted- did not even notice- slavery, in spite of its cruelty. Many parents and students said that the reason for Columbine's bully-coddling culture went straight to the top, to principal Frank DeAngelis, himself a jock."

"One reason why our society has failed to curb bullying is that we like bullies. Hell, we are bullies. Research has shown that bullies are not the anti-social misfits that adults, in their forced amnesia, want them to be. Rather, bullies are usually the most popular boys, second only on the clique-ranking to those described as friendly, outgoing, and self-confident. The Santana High kids and parents both felt that there was no point in complaining to the administration because they wouldn't have done anything anyway, a reflection of the fact that popular winners are treated better than losers. At Columbine, parents and students both felt that bullies were favored by teachers and administrators, and that complainers were often ignored or blamed. Indeed, losers pay for being losers twice over in our schools, taking both the punishment and the blame."

"I don't know a single useful lesson that I or anyone else ever learned from getting bullied- it only brought shame and debilitating memories. Getting bullied always leads you to wrong decisions and wrong conclusions. You compensate in all the wrong ways. You wind up looking for someone weaker to bully yourself, you lose confidence and hate your weakness, and you fear and distrust the wrong people, all of which are reasons why bullied kids overwhelmingly wind up as failures in the real world, according to recent studies. You have to have never been bullied to think that it teaches something valuable and necessary and makes you a stronger person. Dr. Tonja Nansel, who worked on a 1998 World Health Organization survey on Health Behavior in School-Aged Children, showed that both bullies and the bullied develop far greater problems later on in life- bullied kids particularly have difficulties making friends, and suffer from lifelong loneliness."

"I know that I learned far more valuable lessons when I was the bully than when I was bullied. The lesson was simple: it felt better to be the one dishing it out. The pangs of remorse after pummeling a scrawny dork wore off pretty quickly; the humiliations of being on the receiving end, however, were replayed over and over and over, for years and years. I cannot imagine what kind of callous moron could possibly see anything in being a victim of bullying. Maybe the idea comes from our cultural propaganda, where the bullied nerd, like Back to the Futures McFly, always fights back in the triumphant climax, becomes a stronger person for it, and goes on to be a successful patron of a nuclear family, while the bully winds up washing his car. Bullying, in our cultural propaganda, is simply a dramatic plot device which the hero overcomes. Rarely, if ever, is it represented as it really works- as something privately eating away at kids, flat and uninteresting, and never overcome... As Dr. Nansel said, "In the past, bullying has simply been dismissed as kids will be kids," but now that we are waking up to its effects, "it should not be accepted as a normal part of growing up.""

"While bullying (a playground word that seems to cheapen its truly devastating effects) is finally being recognized as wrong in specific settings where rage massacres have taken place, what is still being avoided is bullying on the broader, cultural level. We ignore the bullying of the Al Dunlaps, who abuses his wife, fires tens of thousands of workers and walks away with tens of millions for himself... and not only gets away with it, but becomes adored for his "mean business". Just as bullies are popular in schools. Or the bullying of Reaganomics, where the vulnerable were sacrificed in order to fatten up the rich, an uninterrupted policy that is only getting worse. Or the bullying of the new management style that pushes for increased fear and stress to squeeze "unlimited juice," and that creates a workforce that "never leaves" in spite of it. Not to mention, of course, the bullying of President Bush's foreign policy, which has turned most of the world against America to a degree not seen in our lifetime, yet which has made Bush even more popular at home... that is until the bullied started fighting back."

"[S]ocial media has enabled the rise of mass movements that use trolling as a deflection tool for "doing the most damage I can do and then saying it was just a joke.""

"There are no two ways about it. Trump is a bully. By intimidating others, he believes he can get what he wants, not what is fair. It's a philosophy he brags about. He regales staff with stories about filing meritless claims in court against other companies in order to coerce them to back down or get a better deal. That's how you get them to do what you want. During the 2016 campaign, journalist Bob Woodward asked Trump about President Obama's view that "real power means you can get what you want without exerting violence." In his response, Trump made a revealing confession: "Real power is through respect. Real power is, I don't even want to use the word, fear." President Trump shows no mercy. Political opponents are wartime opponents, and there should be no clemency. Trump remains fixated ion his previous presidential rival years into his tenure, continuously disparaging and demeaning her. It might be a different situation if he expected to face off again with Hillary Clinton, yet she appears to be finished with public office. Don't get me wrong. No one in the Trump White House is a fan of Hillary Clinton, but we started to find the president's chronic animosity toward her to be a little weird. He has tweeted about Clinton hundreds of times since taking office. He has even flirted with using the powers of his office to investigate and prosecute her... Electoral defeat is not enough; Donald Trump wants total defeat of his opponents."

"The president's obvious admiration for Vladimir Putin ("a great guy," "terrific person") still continues to puzzle us, including those on the team who shrug off his outlandish behavior. Where did the Putin hero worship come from? It's almost as if Trump is the scrawny kid trying to suck up to the bully on the playground. Commentators have speculated, without any evidence, that Moscow must "have something" on the president. I wish I could say. All I know is that whatever drives his love for Putin, it's terrible for the United States because Vladimir Lenin is not on our side and no US president should be building him up. We need a comprehensive strategy to counter the Russians, not court them. But Trump is living on another planet, one where he and Putin are companions and where Russia wants to help America be successful. As a result, US officials fear they're "on their own" in fighting back against Moscow. They're right. They are. If an agency wants to respond to Russia's anti-US behavior around the world, they shouldn't plan on steady air cover from the president. In fact, officials know they risk Trump's ire if the subject comes up in public interviews or congressional testimony. "I don't care," one fellow senior leader snapped when reminded by his staff that he needed to watch his words in Senate meetings. "He can fire me if he wants. I'm going to tell the truth. The Russians are not our friends.""

"In high school, they don't call it cyber bullying at all. They call it digital drama, they call it life. They don't want to call it bullying because they think it makes them look weak."

"Imagine being unable to escape as the bully relentlessly pursues them online in a form accessible 24/7. Imagine how bleak that must be; imagine how lonely it must be."

"The U.S. is supposed to be different, but Trump sees the world as an extension of himself — a place where bullies gain wealth and power by mistreating others and controlling them with fear."

"Dominick Krankall was playing at his Connecticut home when the boy who lived below him called out his name. Moments after 6-year-old Dominick went to go meet the 8-year-old neighbor who had bullied him on Sunday, Krankall’s family said, Dominick shrieked in horror when the 8-year-old allegedly launched a tennis ball at his face that was soaked in gasoline and lit on fire. “As soon as he walked down the stairs, the bully called his name and lured him over around the corner,” Dominick’s sister, Kayla Deegan, told WNBC in New York City, “and in a matter of seconds he came back around the corner screaming, saying, ‘Mommy, they lit me on fire! They lit me on fire!’” The attack left Dominick with second- and third-degree burns on his face and legs, and most of the boy’s body is swollen and bandaged. Authorities in Bridgeport, Conn., noted in a police report how preliminary findings show that “up to four unattended children were seen playing with gasoline and lighting objects on fire.” “The incident is currently still under investigation as to the exact cause of the burn injuries by the Bridgeport Police, Bridgeport Fire and State Fire Investigation Teams,” police wrote in the report. No charges have been handed down as of early Wednesday. Scott Appleby, the director of emergency management for Bridgeport, told The Washington Post that no other details were immediately available to be shared to the public. Neither the 8-year-old nor his family have been publicly identified."

"Dominick’s family wrote in an online fundraiser that the 8-year-old boy’s mother “thinks he is innocent.” But Maria Rua, Dominick’s mother, told WTNH that her son’s alleged bully “purposefully threw a gasoline-saturated ball that they lit on fire at my son’s face.” “They threw it at Dominick and left him outside alone to die,” she said. The 6-year-old is being treated at Bridgeport Hospital and is expected to recover, Rua said to local media. John Cappiello, a hospital spokesman, told The Post that Dominick is in fair condition as of Wednesday morning. “Fair is better than critical and better than serious, so we’re trying to do our best for him,” Cappiello said. “It’s a terrible thing.” The 6-year-old’s family say Dominick has been bullied by the 8-year-old for the past year. Deegan alleged to WNBC that the 8-year-old previously sent Dominick to the hospital with a concussion after her younger brother was pushed into a wall and fell to the floor about two months ago. Dominick was playing at their Louisiana Avenue home in Bridgeport on Sunday afternoon when he was called over by the 8-year-old. Dominick’s family alleged to local media that the 8-year-old neighbor gained access to a shed on the property, which is how he was able to get a hold of gasoline and lighters. Then, Deegan said to WNBC, the 8-year-old lit the gasoline-soaked tennis ball and “just chucked it right at my brother’s face — and then ran away from him and watched him burn.” Bridgeport authorities responded to a report of a child burned shortly after 3:45 p.m., according to the police report. Dominick was transported to the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, police said."

"Burns and fires account for an estimated 3,500 child and adult deaths annually, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. The incident has left Dominick’s family devastated and searching for answers. Deegan said her brother could barely eat, sleep or talk. Family members have shared photos of Dominick completely bandaged up, surrounded by stuffed animals and Iron Man and Spider-Man dolls in his hospital bed. Rua said his whole body is swollen with blisters and that “his face is about twice the size it normally is.”A GoFundMe started by Deegan to help pay for Dominick’s hospital bills has raised more than $76,000 as of Wednesday afternoon. Aaron Krankall, Dominick’s father, told WTIC that they were grateful for the community support in the days since Dominick was burned. “I’m telling Dominick, all these people love you and care about you,” the father said, adding that people have offered to move the family out of the home and away from the alleged bully. “Everyone’s really just helping. The whole community is coming together.” But the boy’s family is left wondering when Dominick, who they described in the online fundraiser as a happy-go-lucky boy who befriended everyone, will be able to ride his bike, play basketball or go fishing again. “He’s such a tough little cookie,” Deegan wrote on GoFundMe. “The bravest 6 year old i’ve ever known.”"

"Jack was made a sergeant, but he shouted at the men so much and bullied them so often, in an effort to convince them of an authority he did not possess, that he was replaced. Or rather, he resigned. "Keep your lousy sergeancy," he said. "I don't want it anyhow.""

"Bullying at work is not only about aggressive behavior. The covert nature of workplace bullying behavior can destroy a target’s health, ability to work, emotional well-being, self-worth, and financial condition. This research is one of the first studies on workplace bullying in the United States. Workplace bullies have a serious negative impact upon the organizations for which they work (Namie & Namie, 2003; Prentice, 2005). Once the bullying atmosphere begins to pervade an organization, morale is destroyed and productivity is affected. The workplace often includes distorted personality types that seem to have just one purpose: to find somebody else to attack, to belittle, to criticize, and to destroy (Prentice). Bully behavior, whether committed by men 94 or women, should be further examined due to the long-term costs for both employees and the organizations for which they work. Many leaders and managers either fail to recognize the problem or are themselves the problem. Early studies on bullying focused on the behavior of the bully, the target, or the bully-target pairing (Olweus, 1999). Recent approaches have adopted an ecological perspective that examines the broader context in which bullying can occur and especially the many interrelated systems of the environment, such as the workplace and its leadership (Namie, 2003). This study presents methods of aggression employed by bullies that leaders must recognize and cease."

"Questions at home and school should be decided in the light of the future. It is a process of toughening, but not the sort of false physical thing that we have called toughening. Our boys and girls ought to know that the bully type, the false "tough," has been the first to break down under the actual fire of battle. The quiet, the calm, the determined have made the best soldiers. Why? Obviously the bully is insecure in himself- he blusters to muster his own courage. Children ought to know that. They ought to be taught to retort to the bully, "You're a coward or you wouldn't make such a noise about being brave. The really brave man simply acts brave- he doesn't have to talk about it.""

"Imagine seeing an attractive girl in the hallway who's in one of your classes, but who you've never really had the chance to talk with. Somehow, you get into a conversation with her. She seems nice, and you like her, and she's laughing and you're starting to get hopeful. Then a couple of football players come around the corner and say, "Hey, what the hell are you talking to her for, faggot? Do you actually think you have a chance with her?" And then they pick you up and push you into a locker, and you look like a pathetic weakling in front of the girl you were trying so hard to impress. Such things were commonplace at Columbine. If a guy was acting in the Columbine drama program, he was immediately labeled a "drama fag." Not only was he not playing sports- which was what all normal guys were supposed to do at Columbine- but he was into that fine arts crap! The bullies found whatever weakness they could and went after it. I was a wuss because I wasn't in sports. I was gay because I liked theatre. Then when I was in debate, it was like, "Ooh, you must be smart, huh huh huh." Apparently, they thought calling someone "smart" was an insult."

"Plenty of people in Littleton criticized the media for being too evasive and violating their privacy. But to be honest, I understood their predicament. They were good people who didn't want to be there any more than we did, but they had a job to do. There were some isolated examples of assholes, sure, but most of the people I met in the media were pretty cool to me. And it was their work that kept information coming out. If it had been up to the police and the school, any reports of bullying would have been suppressed, and the police would have kept quiet about our family's report on the web pages. The questions about police response would have been pushed aside. It was the media who fought to keep that from happening."

"I told them [the press] the truth; I didn't censor myself. Other kids were sugarcoating Columbine, making it sound like this peaceful, tranquil land of flowers and honey that Eric and Dylan had just walked into and shattered. "Oh, sure, there were jocks and everything," they'd say. "But it was never that bad. We just can't understand how this happened in a school like ours." If people wanted to know what Columbine was like, I'd tell them. I'd tell them about the bullies who shoved the kids they didn't like into lockers, or called them "faggot" every time they walked past. I'd tell them about the jocks who picked relentlessly on anyone they considered to be below them. The teachers who turned a blind eye to the brutalization of their pupils, because those pupils weren't the favorites. I told them about the way those who were "different" were crushed, and fights happened so regularly outside school that no one paid attention. I told what it was like to live in constant fear of other kids who'd gone out of control, knowing full well that the teachers would turn a blind eye. After all, those kids were their favorites. We were the troublemakers. "Eric and Dylan are the ones responsible for creating this tragedy," I told them. "However, Columbine is responsible for creating Eric and Dylan.""

"When it comes to Columbine, some solutions are more obvious than others. We have to crack down on all forms of bullying. Obviously, this means the kids on the playground who beat up the outcasts, or the high schoolers who mock and harass the kids wearing black and keeping to themselves. But we also have to look at teachers. Teachers who only like the "good kids" and turn their backs on the rest are causing untold pain and anger in those forgotten students. If students are given up on early, then they learn to hate the system and can no longer be rescued by it. We have to reevaluate what we as a society are doing to our children. They, and not our careers or our personal lives, must be our priority. When people choose to become parents, they must make those children their primary focus- not just say it, but live it. Our kids need that kind of guidance in today's world."

"Eric and Dylan have continued to remain cult heroes to some. Shortly after a programmer used home RPG-maker software to build a video game called Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a visit to the discussion forum on his website revealed just how many kids- kids whose ages were still in the single digits when Columbine happened- idolize the two killers. These kids constantly say things like, "Eric and Dylan struck a blow for bullied kids everywhere." They conveniently leave out the fact that Eric and Dylan didn't kill bullies, but instead shot innocent kids like Rachel Scott. We mentioned kids like these in the first edition of this book, and four years later, their numbers seemed to hold strong. For a time, we would hold online talks with these kids, trying to make them understand. But after a while, you start to spot the ones who have no interest in really listening. Some people will believe what they want to believe, on matter how much evidence you throw at them. If the legend sounds more interesting than reality, the legend often wins."

"Take The Power Out Of Bullying"

"Drill sergeants known how to deal with bullies... "Want to stop a bully? Man the fuck up and punch that motherfucker in the throat! Problem solved.""

"Bullying bosses, studies find, differ in significant ways from the Blutos of childhood. In the schoolyard, particularly among elementary school boys, bullies tend to pick on smaller or weaker children, often to assert control in an uncertain social environment in which they feel uncomfortable. But adult bullies in positions of power are already dominant, and they are just as likely to pick on a strong subordinate as a weak one, said Dr. Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute, an advocacy group based in Bellingham, Wash. Women, Dr. Namie said, are at least as likely as men to be the aggressors, and they are more likely to be targets. In leadership positions that require the exercise of sheer violent will- on the football field or the battlefield- this approach can be successful: consider Vince Lombardy or George Patton. But in an office or on a factory floor, different rules apply, and bullying usually has more to do with the boss's desires than with the employee's needs."

"If you don't give power to the words that people throw at you to hurt you, they don't hurt you anymore — and you actually have power over those people. … So, if you can, realize that the things that people say about you — they don't really matter — it's who you are. And the older you get, the more you'll understand that — because it gets better. And people get nicer too."

"The more animosity reporters sensed, the deeper they probed. What was it like to be an outcast at Columbine? Pretty hard, most of the kids admitted. High school was rough. Most of the students in Clement Park were still speaking confessionally, and everyone had a brutal experience to share. The "bullying" idea began to pepper motive stories. The concept touched a national nerve, and soon the anti-bullying movement took on a force of its own. Everyone who had been to high school understood what a horrible problem it could be. Many believed that addressing it might be the one good thing to come out of the tragedy. All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive. Forty-eight hours after the massacre, USA Today pulled the threads together in a stunning cover story that fused the myths of jock-hunting, bully-revenge, and the TCM. "Students are beginning to describe how a long-simmering rivalry between the sullen members of their clique [the TCM] and the school's athletes escalated and ultimately exploded in this week's deadly violence," it said. It described tension the previous spring, including daily fistfights. The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact."

"There's no evidence that bullying led to murder, but considerable evidence it was a problem at Columbine High. After the tragedy, Mr. D took a lot of flak for bullying, particularly since he insisted he was unaware it had gone on. "I'm telling you, as long as I've been an administrator here, if I'm aware of a situation, then I deal with that situation," he said. "And I believe our teachers, and I believe our coaches. I turned my own son in. I believe that strongly in rules." That may have been part of his downfall. Mr. D did believe strongly in the rules. He held his staff to the same standard, and seemed to believe they would meet it. His unusual rapport with the kids also created a blind spot. It was all smiles when Mr. D strode down the corridor. They sincerely warmed at the sight of him, and sought to please him as well,. Sometimes he mistook that joy for pervasive bliss in his high school. Personal affinities also obscured the problem. Mr. D knew he was drawn to sports. He worked hard to offset that by attending debate tournaments, drama tryouts, and art shows. He conferred regularly with the student senate. But those were all success stories. Mr. D balanced athletics and academics better than overachievers and unders. "I don't think he had a preference on purpose," a pierced-out girl in a buzz cut and red tartan boots said. "He's got a lot of school spirit, and I think he aims it in the direction he's most comfortable with, like school sports and student congress." She saw DeAngelis as a sincere man, making a tremendous effort to interact with students, unaware that his natural inclination toward happy, energetic students created a blind spot for the outsiders. "My Goth friends hated the school," she said."

"Despite the press's obsession with bullying and misfits, that's not how the boys presented themselves. Dylan laughed about picking on the new freshmen and "fags." Neither one complained about bullies picking on them- they boasted about doing it themselves."

"Loyalty is not an entitlement. It must be earned, both by leaders and by those who follow them. And even when loyalty has been earned, it must have limits. (Who among us can forget being asked by our chiding parents, "If your friend told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?" Every day we see misplaced loyalty contributing to problems such as bullying, hazing, sexual harassment, discrimination, and corruption. To be sure, it can be difficult to say no to someone in a position of power who is using loyalty as leverage, especially when that person makes it clear that they expect total and unconditional loyalty. But that's where loyalty must meet moral courage, if we are to act honorably and do what's right."

"BULLYING. A form of harassment that includes acts of aggression by Service members or DoD civilian employees, with a nexus to military service, with the intent of harming a Service member either physically or psychologically, without a proper military or other governmental purpose. Bullying may involve the singling out of an individual from his or her coworkers, or unit, for ridicule because he or she is considered different or weak. It often involves an imbalance of power between the aggressor and the victim. Bullying can be conducted through the use of electronic devices or communications, and by other means including social media, as well as in person."

"I was a victim of bullying. I think with the cyber bullying, the viciousness, the cruelty, that's what I think is really getting people's attention. It's hard to say that bullying in and of itself is going to lead to a suicide attempt, but if a kid is already having difficulty with family issues, or some mental health issues, bullying could really be the thing that pushes them over."

"Definitions of bullying at work further emphasize two main features: repeated and enduring aggressive behaviours that are intended to be hostile and/or perceived as hostile by the recipient (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996; Leymann, 1990b; Zapf et al., 1996). In other words, bullying is normally not about single and isolated events, but rather about behaviours that are repeatedly and persistently directed towards one or more employees. Leymann (1990b, 1996) suggested that to be called 'mobbing' or bullying, such events should occur at least once a week, which characterises bullying as a severe form of social stress. In many cases this criterion is difficult to apply because not all bullying behaviors are strictly episodic in nature. For example, a rumour can circulate that may be harmful or even threaten to destroy the victim's career or reputation. However, it does not have to be repeated every week. In cases we have been made aware of, victims had to work in basement rooms without windows and telephone. Here, bullying consists of a permanent state rather than a series of events. Hence, the main criterion is that the behaviours or their consequences are repeated on a regular as opposed to an occasional basis."

"Parents who are intimidated by texting and social-networking sites view cyberbullying as a terrifying new form of bullying, but the truth is that cyberbullying is just a continuation of existing adolescent behavior, played out in a new arena. Approximately 20-25 percent of kids have been bullied online, and this is a conservative estimate. Bullies and victims can trade places at the click of a mouse, and things move so fast online that it is difficult to process information rationally before acting. For unfortunate kids who find themselves on the receiving end of massive cyberbullying attacks, the relentless barrage of cruelty can create a sensation of sinking into a black hole of pain."

"How exactly does the pain of severe bullying affect the most vulnerable kids? Studies investigating the neuroscience of bullying have found that bullying victims experience anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, difficulty concentrating, headaches, and stomach pain as a result of being bullied. Studies of early social deprivation show that human beings are hardwired to belong, and nowhere is this more evident than in kids jockeying for social position. And the old adage- sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me? Not true. Neuroimaging studies have shown that parts of the cortical brain network are also activated when a person is socially excluded. This goes not just for adults but for children as well. The brain of a child as young as thirteen has been shown to react to pain as if the child were being physically injured. Taunting and bullying hurts, and we have the brain scans to prove it. Even worse, repeatedly being victimized by peers- which is the very nature of bullying, the repetitiveness of it- actually alters brain functioning, which increases the victim's sensitivity to future attacks, even causing the person to perceive an ambiguous situation as threatening. Years after the bullying has ceased, victims are left picking up the wreckage."

"Bullying is a learned behavior. Children are not born cruel. Babies in diapers do not assess each other as too fat, too poor, too dark-skinned, to nerdy, too conceited. Born innocent, they start learning stereotypes as soon as they understand language, and we see bullying behavior in children as young as toddlers. Since preschoolers who display marked aggressiveness have a higher likelihood of being bullies in older grades, the earlier intervention begins, the better the results. It is much easier to inculcate kindness and acceptance into a five-year-old who acts like a bully than a fifteen-year-old who acts like a bully."

"The problem than arises of when to define operationally the duration of bullying behaviours. Leymann (1990b, 19960=) suggested exposure for more than six months as an operational definition of bullying at work. Others have used repeated exposure to negative behaviours within a six-month period as the proposed timeframe (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996). Leymann's strict criterion has been argued to be somewhat arbitrary, as bullying seems to exist on a continuum from occasional exposure to negative behaviours to severe victimisation resulting from frequent and long-lasting exposure to negative behaviours at work (Mattiesen et al., 1989). Yet, the criterion of about six months has been used in many studies in order to differentiate between exposure to social stress at work and victimisation from bullying (e.g. Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996; Mikkelsen and Einarsen, 2001; Niedl, 1995; Varita, 1996; Zapf et al. 1996). The reason for this criterion for Leymann (1993, 1996) was to argue that mobbing leads to severe psychiatric and psychosomatic impairment, stress effects which would not be expected to occur as a result of the normal occupational stressors such as time-pressure, role-conflicts or everyday social stressors. Hence, the period of 6 months was chosen by Leymann because it is frequently used in the assessment of various psychiatric disorders."

"The duration of the bullying seems to be closely related to the frequency of bullying, with those bullied regularly reporting a longer duration of their experience than those bullied less frequently (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996). This seems to be in line with a model of bullying highlighting the importance of conflict-escalation, with the conflict becoming more intense and more personalised over time (Zapf and Gross, 2001). The negative and unwanted nature of the behaviour involves is essential to the concept of bullying. Victims are exposed to persistent insults or offensive remarks, persistent criticism, personal or, even in some few cases, physical abuse (Einarsen, 200b). Others experience social exclusion and isolation; that is they are given the 'silent treatment' or 'sent to Coventry' (Williams, 1997). These behaviours are 'used with the aim or at least the effect of persistently humiliating, intimidating, frightening or punishing the victim' (Einarsen, 2000b, p. 8)."

"Based on both empirical and theoretical evidence, Zapf (1999a) categorised five main types of bullying behaviour: 1 work-related bullying which may include changing the victim's work tasks in some negative way or making them difficult to perform; 2 social isolation by not communicating with somebody or excluding someone from social events; 3 personal attacks or attacks on someone's private life by ridicule or insulting remarks or the like; 4 verbal threats in which somebody is criticised, yelled at or humiliated in public;and 5 spreading rumors."

"Bullies are typically attempting to promote or assert an identity rather than defend one. Their behavior is typically predatory rather than dispute related. Bullies prey on vulnerable targets, usually in the presence of third parties, in order to show how tough they are (see Olweus, 1978). For the bully, dominating the victim is an accomplishment, a way of demonstrating power to himself and others. In case of jealousy, a person may intentionally harm another person who has not attacked or wronged them in any way. Both justice and self-image concerns can produce an aggressive response when someone is jealous. When people think that someone has received an unfair share of some reward, they may attempt to restore equity by harming the person, even when that person is not held responsible for the injustice. We have referred to this behavior as "redistributive justice" (to distinguish it from "retributive justice"). Thus, an employee may blame the supervisor who gives a raise to someone else but attempt to produce unfavorable outcomes for the coworker who received a raise. Jealous people may also attempt to harm the object of jealousy for purposes of downward comparison (Wills, 1981). They may engage in aggressive behavior that lowers the standing of the target on some dimension, thereby providing a favorable comparison for the actor. They put themselves "up" by putting others "down". Wills (1981) suggested that downward comparison was an alternative explanation for the displacement effects obtained in experiments testing frustration-aggression theory. He noted that investigations of displaced aggression, scapegoating, and hostility generalization all involve some challenge to the participants' identities."

"There is no doubt in my mind that in the majority of quarrels the Hindus come out second best. But my own experience confirms the opinion that the Mussalman as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward. I have noticed this in railway trains, on public roads, and in the quar­rels which I had the privilege of settling. Need the Hindu blame the Mussalman for his cowardice? Where there are cowards, there will always be bullies. They say that in Saharan­pur the Mussal­mans looted houses, broke open safes and, in one case, a Hindu woman's modesty was outraged. Whose fault was this? Mussalmans can offer no defence for the execrable conduct, it is true. But I, as a Hindu, am more ashamed of Hindu cowardice than I am angry at the Mussalman bullying."

"Bullies are cowards and if you stand up to them they back away."

"Have courage. Be bold. Do not let yourself be intimidated. Do not yield to the bullies. Stand up. Speak out. Fear God, not men."

"Why is it that our fear, suspicion, and hatred of others different from us have overpowered our good sense and moral commitments to civility, goodwill, justice, and tolerance? When we think of Columbine we now know that these kids were bullied. School violence is on the rise and we as educators must consider the way students treat others who are different."

"Some bullies are put into leadership positions because they appear to be smart, ambitious, results-oriented and "take-charge." All of which may be true (as in Brenda’s case), but in addition to those more positive characteristics, most bullies lack empathy. They seem immune to the suffering of others."

"Bullying is bad. By definition, it's a type of regular unwanted negative communication or behavior. This behavior can be from a single person or a multitude of people. However, it's an aggression towards another person against their will. It's communication with the intent to demean, degrade, torment, shame, humiliate or insult another human being. Bullying does not discriminate. Bullying can happen to anyone at any time. It can find you no matter your age, race, or gender. Bullies tend to pick on people who are not inclined to fight back. They target individuals that appear to be weaker and easier to impose their control over. Bullying could include threatening another person, spreading rumors or excluding them socially from a group. It's a monster with many heads. A very bad monster."

"Bullying doesn't always happen to a single individual. If it's a group, it's usually a significantly small group. Maybe two or three people at the hands of another larger group or higher authority. There is typically an upside to the bully which gives them the upper hand once the bullying begins. Their upper hand denotes a presence of power or dominance. That's the core concept of bullying- an imbalance of perceived power. Sometimes that power is revealed by a ton of different reasons, but other times it can be delegated to a person with an authoritative position."

"We use our words to verbally communicate with one another. Verbal bullying is using this kind of communication to openly assault another person with words. It is often times used in the form of teasing, humiliation, insults, racist comments, putdowns, name-calling, or mean and harsh criticism. Unlike physical bullying, verbal bullying is harder to see and stop. It tends to occur when adults or a authority are not around to stop it. The effects of it are not always obvious. It's one of the sneakiest ways to bully someone. Also, it's one of the most difficult things to prove actually happened. You have to pay attention to what people say and how it could potentially affect the other person. Someone might use their verbal language to gain power over them and intentionally cause psychological turmoil. Unwanted words towards another person could potentially elicit negative emotions. They are used to degrade or insult someone's character or state of being."

"We all want the same thing; for humanity to work together for the greater good of each other. To treat the next person as we want to be treated and vice-versa. What a great nation we would be if we could apply a simple principle like that. But we live in a world full of hate, racism, classism, colorism, jealousy, bitterness, abuse of power, molestation, drunkenness, violence, gangs, war, crime, etc. There's more, but it hurts just to identify a small portion of what really happens in this world on that list. All of that is born out of evil. Some of these can certainly be reasons for people turning to bullying. They can indirectly affect children if parents participate in any of these acts. We don't always think about it that way, but it's true. What young people see older people do, they begin to mimic their actions and thus could end up duplicating several offenses. Those offenses would start at a young age and will begin to show its head in elementary, middle and high school. In situations like that, the question is always- why do they act that way? What is making them do that? You always have to start with what's going on at home and what are the influences that surround the student. Evaluate the parents and their involvement with the student, then move on to who they hang out with and what they are feeding their minds from the television and the internet. Once you do that, you will quickly find answers to all your questions."

"Remember, boys and girls. Your school, like our country, is made up of Americans of many different races, religions, and national origins. So, if YOU hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race, or national origin, don't wait. TELL HIM THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN. HELP KEEP YOUR SCHOOL ALL AMERICAN!"

"The man's eyes shifted to me. "Another one," he said, as if marveling that there could be so many assholes in the world. "You want me to take you both on? Is that what you want? Believe me, I can do it." Yes, I knew the type. Ten years younger and he would have been one of the guys at school who thought it terribly amusing to slam Arnie's books out of his arms when he was on his way to class or to throw him into the shower with all his clothes on after phys ed. They never change, those guys. They just get older and develop lung cancer from smoking too many Luckies or step out with a brain embolism at fifty-three or so."

"Since the tragedy, much has been written about the school culture at Columbine High School, and Dylan's place in it. Regina Huerter, director of Juvenile Diversion for the Denver district attorney's office, compiled a report in 2000, and Ralph W. Larkin independentley confirmed many of her findings in his exhaustively researched 2007 book, Comprehending Columbine. Both researchers found Columbine High School was academically excellent and deeply conservative; that much we knew. But they also describe a school with a pervasive culture of bullying- in particular, a group of athletes who harassed, humiliated, and physically assaulted kids at the bottom of the social ladder. Larkin also points to proselytizing and intimidation by evangelical Christian students, a self-appointed moral elite who perceived the kids who dressed differently as evil and targeted them."

"This research lines up with many anecdotal stories we heard after the tragedy from kids who suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their classmates at the school. One story in particular stands out. When Tom went to the sheriff's department in the fall of 1999 to retrieve Dylan's car from the impound lot, a county employee offered his condolences and told him how his own son's hair had been set on fire by some other students while he was attending Columbine High School. The boy, who sustained fairly serious burns to his scalp, refused to allow his father to go to the administration because he was afraid it would make the situation worse. Shaking with anger as he spoke, though the incident was no longer recent, the outraged dad told Tom he had wanted to take the school apart "brick by brick.""

"About five years after the massacre, I spoke with a Columbine High School counselor. He told me that, after an earlier, publicized bullying incident, the high school had implemented closer supervision of the student body, including teachers in the hallways between classes, and in the cafeteria at lunch. But we agreed it's impossible to control what two thousand students are doing on a campus- or to know what those kids are doing to one another in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Despite the administration's claim that steps were taken to stem conflict among students, their efforts fell short. For many people, Columbine High School was a hostile and frightening place even if you were one of the most popular kids, and Dylan and his friends were not. One of our neighbors told us her grown son's reaction to the tragedy, a refrain we heard many times: "I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner.""

"I personally fall somewhere in the middle. Bullying, however severe, is not an excuse for physical retaliation or violence, much less mass murder. But I do believe Dylan was bullied, and that along with many other factors, and perhaps in combination with them, bullying probably did play some role in what he did."

"Dylan's struggles may have been hidden from us, but they were not uncommon ones. A 2011 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 20 percent of high school students nationwide reported they had been bullied on school property in the thirty days before the survey; an even higher percentage reported they'd been bullied on social media. Anti-bullying advocates suggest the number may be closer to 30 percent. A tremendous amount of research has been done on the effects of peer harassment, and there is unquestionably a correlation between bullying and brain health disorders that stretches all the way into adulthood. A Duke University study found that, compared with kids who weren't bullied, those who were had four times the prevalence of agoraphobia, generalized anxiety, and panic disorder as adults. The bullies themselves had four times the risk of developing antisocial personality disorder. There is also a strong association between bullying and depression and suicide. Both being a victim and bullying others is related to high risks of depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. Researchers at Yale found that victims of bullying were two to nine times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than other children."

"The connection between bullying and violence toward others is more complicated, although again there's a correlation. Bullied kids often become bullies themselves, which appears to be what happened with Dylan and Eric. Larkin cites a student who claims they terrorized her brother, a student with special needs, so badly he was afraid to come to school. Researchers call students who both bully and suffer bullying "bully-victims," and find that these bully-victims are at the greatest psychological risk. "Their numbers, compared to those never involved in bullying, tell the story: 14 times the risk of panic disorder, 5 times the risk of depressive disorders, and 10 times the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior."

"The issue that has received the most attention as a factor in school shootings is bullying. According to this sound bite, school shooters are victims of bullying who seek revenge for their mistreatment. It is understandable that this idea would take hold in the minds of many people. We can easily grasp and relate to the concept of being hurt and wanting to retaliate. If a student attacks his peers, it seems logical that he must have been driven to such an act. In reality, however, this sound bite is not accurate. The situation is much more complex."

"This same dynamic occurred with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, where they were teased in response to their own provocative behavior. In contrast, the sound bite coverage of Columbine focused on them as innocent victims of a toxic peer culture in which they were persistently harassed. This one-sided view has become fixed in many people's minds, often leading to an assumption that bullying is the primary cause of school shootings. Because this sound bite has assumed the proportion of a myth, it is necessary to take an in-depth look at what really happened. Based on the available evidence, the extent that Eric and Dylan were bullied has been exaggerated, and their harassment and intimidation of other students has been overlooked or minimized."

"This point may seem obvious, but it needs to be said: School shooters are disturbed individuals. These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation. These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems. This fact has often been missed or minimized in reports on school shooters. Why, then, if school shooters are a complex phenomenon, has there been such a focus on simplistic explanations like bullying? One reason is that in the immediate aftermath of an attack, detailed information about the perpetrator is not available. It may take months or years for relevant details to be made public, and by that point, the story is no longer front-page news. As a result, the more in-depth information does not reach as large an audience as the initial reports. Another issue is that most people are not mental health professionals and therefore cannot be expected to understand personality disorders, depression, trauma, and psychotic disorders. In addition, there is sometimes a suspicion regarding reports of psychosis. People often believe that criminals invent reports of hallucinations or delusions in order to avoid being found guilty. There is yet another reason for the triumph of the sound bite. Put simply, we can all understand the concept of revenge."

"There are two contradictory views of Eric Harris. One is that he was an ostracized, lonely boy who was tormented by peers into an act of retaliatory violence. The alternate view is that he was essentially an evil monster. This is a pejorative label, however, not an explanation. To understand Eric, we need to go beyond labels to the internal workings of his mind. When we do so, we find that both views- the mistreated loner and the evil monster- are inadequate. The view of Eric as a lonely victim of harassment is not only inadequate but, to a significant extent, inaccurate... Eric was not a loner. He had lived in Colorado through middle school and high school, had multiple groups of friends and engaged in a wide variety of activities with his peers. He lived a highly social life and was liked by both boys and girls. On April 9, 1999, just 11 days before the attack, a group of Eric's friends took him out to dinner to celebrate his eighteenth birthday. But he was teased, wasn't he? Yes, he was. But so were many other kids at Columbine, not to mention everywhere else. And bullying? Having read thousands of pages of interview reports from nearly every student at Columbine High School, I found only one report of an incident in which Eric was physically harassed, and this consisted of being pushed into lockers."

"Trump's standard tool kit for getting out of trouble- bullying, bluster, and manipulation- was useless in managing the pandemic. He tried to cloak reality with happy talk. He promised cures that would never be realized. He floated dangerous and unproven treatments, such as injecting bleach into patients' bodies. He muzzled experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who challenged his shaky claims and became more popular than the president. He refused to lead by example and wear a mask. He picked feuds with health officials and state governors scrambling to respond to emergency outbreaks, striking out at those who didn't praise his haphazard response. Not only did he fail to keep Americans safe; he couldn't keep himself safe. Trump was hospitalized with COVID-19 in October 2020, zapping his false air of invincibility."

"It's unbearable to think any young person should feel there is no other option but to end their life because of bullying on social networking sites."

"Shame is a powerful driver not to tell someone something, so telling a parent that you have sent a naked picture of yourself... it's no wonder they don't tell. Sexual shame is a double whammy."

"[Trump ... alpha male] they’re overcompensating for how insecure they feel — a man who is secure with himself, a human who is secure with themselves, doesn’t have to go around bullying people all the time."

"I don't know about you, but for me, sixth grade was rough. None of the kids were into the same music or clothes as me. And that was fine with me, but it mattered to them. It got to the point where I looked forward to my visits to Granddad and Mema's, not only because I loved hanging out with them but also because I could relax there and not worry about some kid looking at me funny or calling me names, just because I liked sneakers instead of cowboy boots. I pretended that getting teased didn't bug me, but of course it did back then."

"I didn't take any of the social stuff at school that seriously. My main way of dealing with it was this: I was really quiet in school. I sat in the back and watched everyone and didn't say much. But for some reason, the kind of kids who care about being popular in high school are never content to let you do your own thing. As I got older, some kids still gave me a hard time about the way I dressed and the fact that I wasn't obsessed with the rodeo and country music like everyone else was. The one good thing I can say about this time is that it made me get clear on something: Either they were right or I was right. And I knew they weren't right. I knew there was a whole world out there, with all different kinds of music and people, and I knew I was going to get out of this small town someday and join it. And when I did, I was never going to look down on anyone. I was going to let everyone be who they wanted to be and not worry about it. I'd be too busy enjoying my life."

"The person hurt most by bullying is the bully himself. Most bullies have a downwardly spiraling course through life. Bullies... are fare more likely than nonaggressive kids to commit crimes, batter their wives, abuse their children- and produce another generation of bullies."

"I talked to a lot of kids that get bullied, they brought it on themselves."

"Bullying is one violent way that boys try to demonstrate their masculinity. Smaller, physically ineffectual boys are often singled out as targets of bullying by older boys. The captain of the debate team at Heath told us how he had his head knocked into the lockers on one occasion, and was beaten up by a bigger kid on the bus on another. One (not small) freshman told us that for months he would dodge behind a teacher when he saw an older bully coming, to avoid receiving hard punches on the shoulder that "really physically hurt." Another senior told us that he witnessed a group of twelve older boys chase and tackle younger and smaller ones for fun. Students described bullying and harassment as an everyday occurrence in the hallways, in "flex time," and in the bathrooms and said that despite its prevalence, teachers were either unaware of it or unable to stop it. Bullying makes it possible for more powerful students to call attention to their superiority on grounds that favor them. Scholarly students told us that bullying was often initiated by farm boys who had been held back at least one grade and often two and resented the brighter futures of the college-bound kids. Pushing others around was a means for these kids to draw attention to the ways that they were strong and others weak (literally)."

"In addition to physical bullying, teasing that degraded the victim's masculinity was also common. Bullying experts have suggested that in recent decades, as teachers have become more aware of the importance of cracking down on physical bullying, teasing with the explicit intention of lowering the victim's self-worth is on the rise, and it has even been given a name: shaming. While the purpose of physical bullying is to control the victim (in the classic case, such as to make him turn over his lunch money), the purpose of shaming is to make the victim feel worse about himself."

"There is probably no more powerful source of stigma for an adolescent boy than being labeled gay. The risk to a boy's reputation is immeasurable, and his place on the social ladder is utterly compromised if even a smidgeon of it sticks."

"The power of this epithet has grown so much that it now covers a much wider range of behavior than the purely sexual reference that it connoted in the past. The term "gay" is now used as a slang term for any form of social or athletic incompetence. Students routinely say to one another "that's gay" when they are talking about a wide array of mistakes or social failures. If someone fails to make the right move on a soccer field or drops a lunch tray in the cafeteria, the kid behind him is quite likely to say, "That's really gay." Why? one fifteen-year-old girl provided an explanation: "Boys have a fascination with not being gay. They want to be manly, and put each other down by saying 'that's gay.'" Thus for boys, the struggle for status is in large part competition for the rank of alpha male, and any loss one boy can inflict on another opens up a new rung on the ladder that he might move into."

"For the record if someone did that to me I'd hitch a ride to the International Space Station straight away; of coarse who am I kidding, they would never let me in, I've got spiders for hands! Internet is mean!"

"If there’s one goal of this conference, it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up."

"LITTLETON, CO— On April 20, when two students at Columbine High School opened fire in a brutal shooting spree that left 12 classmates and a teacher dead, many feared that this affluent suburban school would never be the same. But now, more than four months after a tragedy that shook the nation to its core and marked the most notorious incident of school violence in U.S. history, the atmosphere is optimistic. Slowly but surely, life at Columbine is returning to normal. Thanks to stern new security measures, a militarized school environment and a massive public-relations effort designed to obscure all memory of the murderous event, members of Columbine's popular crowd are once again safe to reassert their social dominance and resume their proud, longstanding tradition of excluding those who do not fit in."

"As the school year begins under the watchful eye of 24-hour electronic monitoring and police protection, a sense of normalcy has returned to Columbine. Just like at any other school, the computer geeks are mocked, the economically disadvantaged kids are barely acknowledged, and the chess-club, yearbook and debate-team members are universally reviled. While these traditions are nothing new, from now on they will be much easier to preserve, thanks to the high-tech, draconian security measures that now dominate Columbine life."

"I believe this is the new claim that employers will deal with. This will replace sexual harassment. People who oppose it say these laws will force people to be polite at work. But you can no longer go to work and act like a beast and get away with it."

"I do not like to see an atmosphere of fear in an organization, where shouting, screaming and abuse of subordinates are common. You're probably saying, "Well, who does?" You'd be surprised. I have worked in fear- and abuse-filled organizations and have seen a lot more. Their leaders were at bottom insecure bullies who substituted Sturm und Drang for leadership. I have never known any leader who got the best out of his people that way."

"Bullying is a mean behavior. It is a way to make fun of other people. Some bullies pick on kids or say bad things about them. They also keep other kids from feeling like they are part of the group. Usually, bullying is not a one-time thing. Instead, bullies tease their victims over and over."

"Some bullies spread lies about other kids. They tell mean stories that embarrass kids. Bullies can make their victims feel awful. Bullying can make kids feel like they don't fit in at school. Bullies might say things like, "You can't play with us." Or they might say, "Don't sit at our table." This is how kids make bullies feel as though they are not liked. Kids who are bullied may feel like they are not good enough to be part of the group. But all kids deserve respect."

"Bullying can happen just about anywhere... Bullies can taunt kids in the cafeteria or on the bus. Usually, they choose places where adults are watching too many kids at once. Or they find places where there are no adults at all."

"If you see someone being bullied, try to help. Tell the person being bullied to come sit at your table. Offer to be her partner for a school project. With a group of friends, tell the bully to leave the victim alone. Sometimes a bully will be surprised if a group stands up to him."

"Yet the unwritten code that prevailed in that time and place stigmatized sex. Everyone masturbated but no one admitted it. Getting caught provoked months of merciless ridicule. Older boys, bullies, smacked you on the back of the head on the school bus, taunted you to tears. I only got caught once; I made sure I was never caught again."

"Do try to stand up for others. Maybe your friend is being bullied. Maybe it's happening to someone you don't even know. Either way, just saying something might make it stop. When someone bullies, the person doesn't expect anybody to say anything. Speaking up by saying "Hey, leave him alone!" can be a big surprise for people who bully. Sometimes, other kids might join you in standing up to bullying. When that happens, you have a chance to make a big change in your classroom- and even your whole school! One of the most important things you can do is be kind to kids who are being bullied. Invite them to hang out with you. Sit with them on the bus or at lunch. Let them know they are not alone. Don't say, "Whew, glad it's not me being picked on," and walk away thanking your lucky stars. The people who witness bullying are called bystanders. When bystanders stand together, they can make big changes. It's only when people act like bullying is okay that it keeps going on. And on, and on, and on."

"People have more ways than just words and physical force to bully others. They can also use their cell phones, tablets, and computers. No, they don't use these devices as weapons to throw at people. They use them to embarrass, threaten, humiliate or shame people. They might put hurtful or embarrassing photographs, videos, information, text messages, or Web posts online. They might do this with social media like Instagram or on websites. They might use text messages and email. This type of bullying is called cyberbullying. Bullying online is happening more and more because it's easier to do than other types of bullying. Plus, kids can do it anywhere- at home, in school, and anywhere else people go online. Someone might not have the courage to call you a name to your face. But posting a rude message online just takes a few clicks. These messages and images are even easier to spread- and they scan spread fast. As soon as one person forwards a message or "likes" a post, the audience grows. The pain and embarrassment multiplies. Meanwhile, the person who started it all gets to hide behind a computer or phone."

"It's not okay for anyone, whether they're a friend or not, to bully you. If something a friend or group of friends does online upsets you, be sure to let them know that you are not happy with what they have said about you. If they say it's just a joke, tell them it's not a joke to you. If it continues, tell an adult. If you can't trust your friend to treat you fairly and with respect, you might have to end the friendship. Friendship does not give people permission to treat you badly."

"Everybody, everywhere has been bullied at some point in their lives. Even people who bully have been bullied! (Which is one reason why they act the way they do.) But that doesn't mean bullying is okay. Or that you should suffer in silence. Or that you should bully. What will you do the next time someone bullies you? Think about it. Make a plan. Be ready to speak up, walk away, or run away. Bullying is a pain in the brain. But it doesn't have to give you a permanent headache."

"With nearly a million children educated in our schools, we not only must demonstrate a profound commitment to stamp out such stereotyping and bullying, but we must also take action. We are therefore developing a programme for use in our schools, taking the best advice we can find anywhere, that specifically targets such bullying... I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race."

"Adult bullying at work is a shocking, frightening, and at times shattering experience, both for those targeted and for onlookers. Workplace bullying, mobbing, and emotional abuse essentially synonymous phenomena*are persistent, verbal, and nonverbal aggression at work that include personal attacks, social ostracism, and a multitude of other painful messages and hostile interactions. Because this phenomenon is perpetrated by and through communication, and because workers’ principal responses are communicative in nature, it is vital that communication scholars join the academic dialogue about this damaging feature of worklife. The harm to workers runs the gamut of human misery including ‘‘anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, helplessness, ... difficulty concentrating, alcohol abuse (Richman, Flaherty, & Rospenda, 1996), and posttraumatic stress disorder (Leymann & Gustafsson, 1996; Mikkelsen & Einarsen, 2002). Witnessing co-workers experience increased fear, emotional exhaustion, hypervigilance, stress, and intentions to leave (Jennifer, Cowie, & Anaiadou, 2003; Vartia, 2001, 2003). Bullying also hinders group communication, cohesion, and performance by creating hostile environments marked by apprehension, distrust, anger, and suspicion (Frost, 2003; Lockhart, 1997; Vartia, 2003). What makes this communicative phenomenon especially grave is its elevated prevalence in US workplaces. From 28% to 36% of US workers report persistent abuse at work (Keashly & Neuman, 2005; Lutgen-Sandvik, Tracy, & Alberts, 2005; Neuman, 2004), and nearly 25% of US companies report some degree of bullying (Blosser, 2004). Furthermore, over 80% of workers say they have witnessed bullying sometime during their work histories (Keashly & Neuman, 2005; Lutgen-Sandvik, 2003a; Namie, 2003b). Given its prevalence and negative consequences, bullying warrants the attention of communication scholars, particularly those studying power and oppression."

"On the other hand, witnesses were also deeply disturbed by their experiences. Similar to target-witnesses, they spoke of how the workplace experience took over their entire lives, they worried about it at and away from work, they talked about it continually to family and friends, they spent large segments of work time speaking with others or figuring out how to deal with or avoid being abused. Witnesses and targets reported that their experiences and failure of organizational authorities to stop abuse stripped away their beliefs that good prevails over evil."

"Resistance to abuse at work is a complex, dynamic process in which workers fight to have a voice and are often punished for their efforts. If and when organizational authorities finally intervene, many have already left the organization or suffered years of abuse. The human cost is staggering and workers’ stories heartbreaking. Neither is resistance straightforward; worker dissent is easily reframed as deviant behavior by those for whom the resistance is threatening. Nonetheless, workers faced with bullying at work say they have a moral imperative to act against the injustice and in some cases actually alter their situations. Furthermore, workers often collectively organize against abusers, even in the absence of formal unions. Organizations would be well-informed to heed these voices. Resistance and the emotional communication that springs from it are warning signs that "act as signaling devices when expected appropriate norms of communication are violated" (Waldron, 2000, p.72). These should not be ignored. Organizational authorities must learn to "read the traces" of resistance to bullying, diagnose the problem early, and construct effective interventions."

"More than 90% of adults experience workplace bullying—that is, psychological and emotional abuse—at some time during the span of their work careers (Hornstein, 1996). The supervisors who inflict psychological abuse on subordinates represent one of the most frequent and serious problems confronting employees in today’s workforce (Yamada, 2000). Although the television news is quick to report the rare but sensational incidents of disgruntled employees returning to their former workplaces seeking revenge (e.g., “Office Rampage,” 1999), rarely do we see stories of employee humiliation and psychological violence perpetrated by more powerful organizational members. Research indicates a link between workplace abuse and workplace violence as the aggressor becomes increasingly more threatening to targeted employees (Namie & Namie, 2000). In addition to increased threats of violence from abusers (Leymann, 1990), employees who feel unfairly treated may express their anger and outrage in subtle acts of retaliation against their employers, including work slowdown or covertly sabotaging the abuser (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). As reported in a government study, “The cost to employers is untold hours and dollars in lost employee work time, increased health care costs, high turnover rates, and low productivity” (Bureau of National Affairs [BNA], 1990, p. 2). Employee emotional abuse (EEA) is a repetitive, targeted, and destructive form of communication directed by more powerful members at work at those less powerful."

"For the purposes of this article, EEA is defined as targeted, repetitive workplace communication that is unwelcome and unsolicited, violates standards of appropriate conduct, results in emotional harm, and occurs in relationships of unequal power (Keashly, 2001). EEA has also been labeled workplace mistreatment (Price Spatlen, 1995), workplace aggression (Baron & Neuman, 1998), workplace harassment (Bjorkqvist et al., 1994), verbal abuse (Cox et al., 1991), psychological abuse (Sheenan et al., 1990), and chological violence (Institute for Workplace Trauma and Bullying, 2002)."

"Emotional abusers appear to be particularly skilled at appearing to provide constructive feedback because the organization formally requires it. The extremes to which managers go to build a verbal and written case against the target suggest that this is done to “make . . . action appear justifiable and reasonable to all parties” (Fairhurst et al., 1986, p. 569). They are inclined to systematically distort these communicative processes if they want to get rid of an employee (author’s experience), and because the more powerful member creates the documenting language, they author the formal record of “what occurred.” Rather than improve performance, this form of chronic criticism more often unnerves targets (Lockhart, 1997) and results in further poor performance that substantiates the abuser’s initial claims of incompetence (Wyatt & Hare, 1997)."

"A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied."

"Last year, when I was in sixth grade, our class watched a video about a boy who was bullied because of his disabilities. A girl at his school went on the internet and told everyone she wanted to have a relationship with him. Once she put it out there, she couldn't take it back. When the boy found out it was just a joke, he wrote on the Web, "People like you make me want to kill myself." And then he did; he hanged himself."

"Kids are sneaky about bullying. They don't want to get caught, so they make sure to do it when there are no teachers around."

"Don't stand by and do nothing. Sometimes kids who are being bullied need to borrow strength from someone else. If you see someone getting picked on, try to take him or her away from the bully. If you don't feel safe doing this, report the incident to an adult."

"Junior high was actually sort of hard because I got dumped by this group of popular girls. They didn't think I was cool or pretty enough, so they stopped talking to me. The kids at school thought it was weird that I liked country music."

"Although considerable research has linked workplace bullying with psychosocial and physical costs, the stories and conceptualizations of mistreatment by those targeted are largely untold. This study uses metaphor analysis to articulate and explore the emotional pain of workplace bullying and, in doing so, helps to translate its devastation and encourage change. Based on qualitative data gathered from focus groups, narrative interviews, and target drawings, the analysis describes how bullying can feel like a battle, water torture, nightmare, or noxious substance. Abused workers frame bullies as narcissistic dictators, two-faced actors, and devil figures. Employees targeted with workplace bullying liken themselves to vulnerable children, slaves, prisoners, animals, and heartbroken lovers. These metaphors highlight and delimit possibilities for agency and action. Furthermore, they may serve as diagnostic cues, providing shorthand necessary for early intervention."

"But it was one thing for Donald to stay out of his father's crosshairs and another to get into his good graces. Toward that end, Donald all but eradicated any qualities he might have shared with his older brother. Except for the occasional fishing trip with Freddy and his friends, Donald would become a creature of country clubs and offices, golf being the only thing on which he and his father differed. He would also double down on the behaviors he had thus far gotten away with: bullying, pointing the finger, refusing to take responsibility, and disregarding authority. He says that he "pushed back" and Fred "respected" that. The truth is, he was able to push back against his father because Fred let him."

"Eventually, when Donald went away to military school at thirteen, Fred began to admire Donald's disregard of authority. Although a strict parent in general, Fred accepted Donald's arrogance and bullying- after he actually started to notice them- because he identified with the impulses."

"At the military academy, Donald had survived the first couple of years as an underclassman by using the considerable skills he'd acquired growing up in the family house: his ability to feign indifference in the face of pain and disappointment, to withstand the abuse of the bigger, older boys. He hadn't been a great student, but he'd had a certain charm, a way of getting others to go along with him that, back then, wasn't entirely grounded in cruelty. In high school Donald had been a decent athlete, a guy some people found attractive with his blue eyes and blond hair and his swagger. He had all the confidence of a bully who knows he's always going to get what he wants and never has to fight for it."

"During the most crucial juncture of the Steeplechase deal, its unraveling, and its aftermath, Donald did a fair amount of armchair quarterbacking. Freddy, who had never developed the armor that might have helped him withstand his father's mockery and humiliation, was particularly sensitive to being dressed down in front of his siblings. When they were younger, Donald had been both a bystander and collateral damage. Now that he was older, he felt increasingly confident that Freddy's continuing loss of their father's esteem would be to his benefit, so he often watched silently or joined in."

"A couple of years ago, I was driving in Cincinnati with Usha, when somebody cut me off. I honked, the guy flipped me off, and when we stopped at a red light (with this guy in front of me), I unbuckled my seat belt and opened the car door. I planned to demand an apology (and fight the guy if necessary), but my common sense prevailed and I shut the door before I got out of the car. Usha was delighted that I'd changed my mind before she yelled at me to stop acting like a lunatic (which has happened in the past), and she told me that she was proud of me for resisting my natural instinct. The other driver's sin was to insult my honor, and it was on that honor that nearly every element of my happiness depended as a child- it kept the school bully from messing with me, connected me to my mother when some man or his children insulted her (even if I agreed with the substance of the insult), and gave me something, however small, over which I exercised complete control. For the first eighteen or so years of my life, standing down would have earned me a verbal lashing as a "pussy", or a "wimp" or a "girl." The objectively correct course of action was something that the majority of my life had taught me was repulsive to an upstanding young man. For a few hours after I did the right thing, I silently criticized myself. But that's progress, right? Better that than sitting in a jail cell for teaching that asshole a lesson about defensive driving."

"Somebody who is bullied and has a lot of coping skills, support in their family and in other friends, is probably more resilient than somebody who doesn’t perceive others as being supportive or has low self-esteem, identity issues, or depressed mood."

"Once you have power you have everything."

"It's mostly the popular people that can get away with a lot of stuff because everyone else wants to be friends with whoever is popular."

"Dr. Dan Olweus, a social science researcher in Norway who did much of the original research on bullying, found that by the time bullied children become adults, some "normalization" takes place. Victims are freer to choose or create their own social life. At the same time, he said, they are still at risk for depression and negative feelings about themselves. Another researcher found that adults who had been victims of bullying in childhood reported higher levels of loneliness than did nonvictims. In addition, that study showed that adult men who never married and were shy with women often had a history of being bullied in childhood. That suggests the social withdrawal often seen in victims may continue in later life. Of course, it is not always that way. Many children, perhaps most of them, who are bullied grow up to be normal, happy people. But for some, the fear and self-hatred caused by the bullies never leave."

"For a television special on bullying, children on a playground were videotaped. When the producers watched the tape, they saw a bullying incident about every eight minutes. When they asked teachers how often they stepped in to stop bullying, the teachers said, "All the time." Yet the tape showed them stepping in just 5 percent of the incidents. One teacher admitted, "We rarely see it, we don't intervene and we don't hear it. But kids hear it, see it and are a part of it.""

"Just telling bullies to stop or telling victims to ignore them or fight back are not solutions to a school's bullying problem, experts say. "To prevent bullying, educators need to do nothing less than change the school culture," says researcher J. David Hawkins, "the school environment in which learning takes place.""

"Society is just beginning to understand the effects of bullying and to learn what to do about it. Every child in elementary, middle, or high school needs to ask, "Am I part of the problem or part of the solution?" When more of us are part of the solution than part of the problem, the issue of bullying will no longer devastate as many lives and cause so much pain."

"As the last decade has unfolded I have watched the public discourse on bullying change from trying to understand who is involved in bullying, to a focus that puts the responsibility on children to assume responsibility for changing a culture of bullying and intimidation at school, to a systems-based approach that recognizes the absolute necessity for adults, schools, and communities to take the lead in effecting change."

"It is time to expand the conversation about bullying in childhood and adolescence to consider the long-term effects into adulthood. The trauma of bullying and harassment can leave serious and painful scars on the lives of adults. The anxiety, depression, stress, and relationship dysfunction that can come as a result of childhood bullying are serious at the individual and family level. The consequences are a national health issue and warrant our concern and attention."

"It is critical that we begin to recognize that the effects of so-called typical childhood teasing and bullying do not just go away; instead they shape development and last a lifetime. After reading this book, I would like people to understand that childhood bullying is detrimental. It cannot be considered lightly as in "Kids will be kids." If you stop to ask and then truly listen, you will hear the accounts of many for whom childhood was a time to be endured, not enjoyed. For many, the memories of bullying are indelible. The shadows of their experiences are the basis of this book."

"Problems trusting others can take a generalized state form (as in "I don't trust anybody") or can be very specific to certain groups. People suffering with APBS tend not to trust others. They are particularly cautious in intimate relationships such as friendship and marriage, always expecting that they will be betrayed. Further, they do not trust people who look, act, or even dress like those who bullied them. This lack of trust is problematic for establishing relationships in the first place and for managing them."

"The problem of mistrusting others significantly impairs a person's ability to connect with other people and then to stay connected. People who trust easily establish relationships readily and maintain them. They do not have attachment problems. Children who have been bullied and then end up with adult post-bullying syndrome often appear to either run from relationships or manage to get into abusive ones. After all, they have learned as children that their peers or siblings will treat them badly. For the most part, they never learned how to stop bullying as children. Consequently, they do not know how and often do not even want to extricate themselves from physically or emotionally abusive relationships as adults. This is all they know. At the other end of the continuum are adults so scarred from their bullying experiences that they are willing to end their marriages based on what, to others, might seem reparable. But to some adults suffering with APBS any hint of disrespect or bullying is intolerable."

"Social learning theory indicates that we learn from each interpersonal interaction and we learn how to treat one another (Bandura, 1969). The result, for some people who have been bullied and who have lost trust is to keep a certain emotional distance in all of their relationships."

"Parents tend to think that sibling violence is "sibling rivalry" and is just a normal part of growing up. They fail to understand that kids can only tolerate so much demeaning before a "kick-the-dog" syndrome sets in. In other words, Colin had nowhere else to take his anger except to his sibling. I asked him if he thought about telling his parents to intervene. His response was very typical: "No, I don't think they could do anything. I was also worried it might get worse. Also some of the bullies were my friends." This last sentence tends to perplex parents. Bullied by friends is a concept that does not seem to compute. However this is exactly what happened to Colin, and it happens to many kids."

"This is an area of research needing more investigation. Mackey, Fromuth, and Kelley (2010) did a small study with about 145 undergraduates asking about sibling bullying. Their results indicated that those who considered themselves to be bullied by a sibling when they were children continued to experience anxiety. There are questions that still must be addressed. When a child has been bullied by a sibling or more than one sibling, are there continuing effects into adulthood? The studies above indicate that children bullied by their siblings are more likely than those who have not been bullied to experience anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and self-harming behaviors needing clinical intervention. Do these issues carry over to other stages of life? What happens to these sibling relationships once they are adults? Is all forgotten or forgiven? Or is there always a sense of mistrust? Bowes et. al. (2014) found that children who were bullied by their siblings were more likely to be bullied by peers and, as we have discussed in other sections of the book, the impact of peer bullying does last a lifetime. At this point in time, most have figured out that peer bullying at school and in the community is not acceptable, but sibling bullying remains an arena where adults still take a hands-off attitude."

"Of the participants in my study, 37% told their parents that they were bullied at school. Of that group, about half felt supported by their family whether or not the parent could do anything effective or not. The other half were met with a less than nurturing response. One example that stands out for its lack of compassion is shared by Shana. She was bullied throughout elementary and middle school. At the end of middle school, when she was feeling particularly low, she considered hurting herself. Her father found out about her solution and took her outside with a loaded shotgun. He showed her how to commit suicide by kneeling down, putting the gun under her chin, and pulling the trigger. He very forcefully told her that if that was the route she wanted to take she should do it right then and there. Fortunately, Shana did not follow her father's suggestion. Whether Shana's father behaved in this way out of ignorance or his own fears, we don't know. What we do know is that children who feel connected to and supported by close relationships with family members fare much better at overcoming bullying and developing a sense of resilience that lasts a lifetime (Bowes et al., 2020; Hong & Espelage, 2012; Levin, 2011; Resnick et al., 1997)."

"Parents and caregivers are our first teachers. Siblings, too, model ways of behaving and settling conflicts. They help or harm our psychological and social development. In terms of bullying, they can be bullies or they can teach respectful family interactions and be a child's best advocate. All of these choices carry immediate and long-term consequences. When there has been psychological injury, people may forgive but they rarely forget. There are lifelong reverberations."

"Despite the efforts of adults, bullying, harassment, and hazing continue to be widespread problems in our nation's schools. Virtually all students are involved as victims, bullies, bully/victims, or witnesses. With severe impacts on lifelong development and mental health, finding a way to prevent bullying is a major public health concern. Far more prevalent than we once believed, bullying occurs in our schools and via cyberspace on an around-the-clock basis. There are long-term costs that haunt those involved, and these consequences are not solely carried by the victims. Bullies are more likely than the general population to become workplace bullies (Matthiesen & Einarsen, 2007; Zapf & Einarsen, 2011) or to end up involved with the criminal justice system (Apel & Burrow, 2011; Carter, 2012). As noted earlier, research establishes that both bullies and victims can experience lifelong depression, anxieties, difficulties in relationships, and an inability to trust others. Because bullying is traumatic, it can result in post-traumatic stress disorder."

"While adults admonish children to stop bullying each other, there is an adult moral code witnessed in their behavior that allows for- and promotes- bullying and revenge. Consequently, we have to realize that children do not have enough power to change it and it is not their responsibility. Prevention of this pervasive phenomenon is the direct responsibility of adults. Adults at school and in the community need to make the commitment to examine and change their own behavior if they hope to diminish bullying among children."

"Parents, educators and policy makers must see the serious long-term consequences of bullying. Only in this way will there be a concerted and ongoing effort to interrupt bullying at first signs in childhood. We can no longer afford the attitude that says, "Bullying is just a rite of passage" or "Bullying happens; you get over it." Clearly this is not the case. The adults in this study and in other research prove otherwise. Health and mental health practitioners need a comprehensive vision of the effects of bullying on both children and adults. With the understanding that bullying and harassment may lead to a lifetime of poor decisions, of relationship problems, and of mental health issues, practitioners can begin to regularly ask about current or past bullying episodes. Doing so will provide a key to unlocking the history behind problems clients are experiencing and will offer a direction for treatment. This is a call to parents, educators, and health practitioners, and policy makers to stand up and make a difference so that a childhood of bullying does not turn into an adult life full of its aftermath. Bullying scars."

"The outlook for the most-affected victims is serious, but I believe there is hope that we can continue to reduce the number of victims. Bullying is a learned behavior. Children are not born cruel. Babies in diapers do not assess each other as too fat, too poor, too dark-skinned, too nerdy, too conceited. Born innocent, they start learning stereotypes as soon as they understand language, and we see bullying behaviors in children as young as toddlers. Since preschoolers who display marked aggressiveness have a higher likelihood of being bullies in older grades, the earlier intervention begins, the better the results. It is much easier to inculcate kindness and acceptance into a five-year-old who acts like a bully than into a fifteen-year-old who acts like a bully."

"Social pain changes as kids grow older, and the reasons for bullying become more complex. Tweens and middle schoolers can find themselves perfectly accepted one day and ostracized the next, leaving them bewildered as to how things fell apart. This is what happened with Deanna, who told me that her problems began in sixth grade. "I had never had trouble making friends before, but now that I was in middle school, the girls did not like me because I wore short hair and weird clothes." Deanna's family was barely making ends meet, and her school was located in a wealthy neighborhood. By the middle of the year, the ostracism was overwhelming. "I asked one of the girls why she didn't like me, and she just said, 'because you're weird.' I held out my hand and said, 'I think we got off on the wrong foot; let's start over. Hi, I'm Deanna.' She looked at me and said, 'Start over? We're not going out! What are you, some kind of lesbian?' and then spread the rumor around the school that I was, in fact, a lesbian, and that if any female talked to me, I would rape them.""

"Do kids "invite" bullying by acting differently than others? Stan Davis is one bullying expert who is working to combat that type of thinking. He spoke passionately to me about the need to stop assigning responsibility to the victim, insisting that "we as a society must give up on the adult idea that if someone did something to you, it must be because you did something wrong. Adults think that the only people who get picked on are too passive or too annoying, and if we react to a kid's report of injury from that frame of mind, we have a problem." Davis commented that this mentality is exactly how the police used to react to reports of rape. Police would ask a rape victim what she was wearing. "We have lobbied to change that way of thinking," he said. "Sure, it was a task, but it was successful, and now police would never say to a rape victim, 'Well, what were you wearing?' We need to do the same thing with bullying." Davis stressed that mean behavior is the fault of the person that does it. "I tell parents that their child is teased because there are people who think making fun of someone who is different is acceptable, not because your child has an awkward social style. This requires a big conceptual change: teasing tells us about the person who did it and nothing about the person who was teased.""

"At the same time that we teach empathy to the bullies, we need to stop sending the victims the message that their own behavior or traits are bringing on the attacks. This requires a fundamental change in the way adults view bullying. A child is not bullied because he is gay or autistic or overweight. A child is bullied because a bully has decided that the target is unacceptably different and less worthy of respect. We must teach the targets how to cognitively frame the bullying so that they do not think the abuse is their fault or something they deserve. Groundbreaking new research by Stan Davis and Charisse Nixon has shown that when a victim learns to think about the bullying in new ways- "This bullying is not happening because I am overweight. It is happening because the bully is choosing to act in a mean and hateful way, and that is his fault, not mine"- then the effects of the mistreatment are greatly diminished. Davis and Nixon's research also shows that many bullied kids find relief when they tell an adult or peer, but many are reluctant to do so."

"We need to empower the bystanders and witnesses to speak up or go get help, and we need to teach them that silent or laughing or joining in makes them accountable too. If even a single witness reaches out to a victim, the tide can change. Others will join in, and the balance of power shifts. The situation diffuses, and the bullying will cease. How do we teach these skills? By creating caring environments in which all of the different worlds our children inhabit: the home, the school, the neighborhood, the Internet, the playing fields, and all the places in between. Increasing the adult supervision of high-risk bullying areas is part of the picture. But our budget-strapped schools will be the first to admit that it is impossible to always have a connected, respected teacher in every corner, and time-pressured parents will protest that they cannot be everywhere. This is why our kids need better social skills. We don't want to create a "helicopter parent" approach to bullying intervention. Yes, adult monitoring and intervention are critical, but so is the ability of children to resolve conflict on their own. If we swoop in and rescue our kids every time someone picks on them, we inadvertently teach them that they cannot take care of themselves."

"Bullying is a multifaceted problem, and thus it requires a many-pronged solution. It is not enough to monitor our children's media use, teach empathy to bullies, empower and support the victims, and provide children with social skills and conflict-resolution skills. We have to step back and analyze our own culpability in creating a culture that has fostered attitudes of entitlement and condescension toward those who are different. It is uncomfortable to explore our own secret inconsistencies and stereotypes. One mother told me she initially recoiled at the sight of her preschool son in a dress, before she ultimately decided that he should be allowed to play dress up if that is what makes him happy. Many people disagree with her, and issues of gender noncomformity are particularly controversial. Gender-based bullying is rampant, and it stems from a myriad of places. Even within gender-based bullying, not all victims receive equal defending. The world was quick to defend Katie's right to be a Star Wars-loving girl, but a princess-loving boy is unlikely to receive such universal support. Some people say Star Wars is for everyone and princesses are just for girls. But if you walk into a toy store, Star Wars toys are clearly displayed in the "boys' section" and princesses are relegated to the pink "girls' section". Gender-based toy marketing contributes to gender-based stereotypes and creates situations ripe for bullying."

"None of us is without blame. None of us is without strengths. If we keep these two truths in mind, we are well positioned to take on the problem of bullying with grace and maturity. Every person has a voice that deserves to be heard, even the marginalized and the mute. We just need to listen, and change will occur."

"When I was growing up, bullying was assumed to be a rite of passage. If you got beat up on the playground, that was supposed to toughen you up and show you how to "be a man." If kids called you names, that was "just teasing," and you were told to ignore it and it would stop. And almost no one talked about bullying among girls. The good news is that society is taking bullying a lot more seriously these days. The bad news is that it took tragedies like school shootings to make us wake up. Bullying is abuse, and it carries serious short-term and long-term consequences for all involved: the bullies, the targets, and the observers. Nearly everyone can remember that white-hot feeling when a bully said something meant to humiliate, or the time you tried to will yourself torment you in the locker room, even twenty or thirty years after it happened. Nearly everyone can remember the poor kid who was at the bottom of the social totem pole at school, and any of us can remember wishing to help, but keeping our mouths shut out of fear of being the next target of looking "uncool.""

"Note that bullies are not typically jealous of the kids they pick on, and they don't usually have low self-esteem. That's another myth- one that experts believed for decades until psychological tests showed that bullies typically had self-esteem to spare. When I was growing up, the stereotype of the bully was an overweight, overaggressive, not very intelligent boy who beat up on others to make himself feel better by proving his physical strength. There are still some of this type of bully out there, sure, but there's a much more dangerous bully type now. Today's bullies are often popular, smart, charming to adults, and have many friends, even if their friendships are based on fear. They maintain their social status by making others objects of scorn and ridicule. To most people, they look like leaders. What bullies may not have is empathy, and that may be the most critical element differentiating them from kids with true leadership skills."

"The thing that makes it so hard to deal with these types of bullies is that they're often hard to recognize, and hard for bystanders to stand up to. People like them. Teachers are amused by them. Coaches value them. Their social skills enable them to sweet-talk and appear innocent to adults, and their peers are terrified of standing up to them when they witness bullying behaviors because they could easily become the next targets. Whether they admit it or not, nearly all kids want to be popular. They want to have friends on the highest rung of the social ladder. They'll rarely contradict or confront a popular kid who's doing something wrong because that would make them "uncool" and likely to lose social status themselves. Because of this, the popular bullies learn that they can get away with anything, and their empathy declines. They feel more and more powerful, and feel contempt for the less powerful kids. They're likely to repeat this pattern throughout life in their workplaces, towns, and families- teaching their kids how to climb the social ladder so they can annihilate the "worthless" kids below them, too. That is part of the reason we have to deal with these issues early when they occur, because the longer kids get away with bullying, the less their empathy kicks in to stop these situations."

"By now, most of us realize that the adage "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me" is a load of bull. The truth is that broken bones heal. Broken hearts are much harder to mend, and broken spirits can be lifetime handicaps. And parents, no matter how many times you tell your kids, "You're smart and attractive," if all they hear from their peers is "You're stupid and ugly," the latter is what they'll internalize. They don't believe you. You're biased- and besides, you're "old"! You're not going to negate the effects of verbal bullying just by assuring your child that the kids' words aren't true."

"Bullying is meant to humiliate, and it does its job quite well. Often bullied kids are so embarrassed that they don't even want to tell their parents."

"Sensitive kids expect other kids to be sensitive. When they're not, often the sensitive kid wants to tell the bully how she feels, particularly when they're young and the bullying is verbal. ("You hurt my feelings." "I don't like it when you say that!" "Stop, you're making me upset.") Some parents encourage this, too, believing that if the bully just understood the words or behaviors were hurtful, they'd stop. This is wishful thinking, and works only when you're not dealing with a true bully. True bullies don't have empathy--at least not for your child. They do not care that they've hurt your child's feelings...in fact, that's exactly what they want. So if your child expresses that his feelings are hurt, it's just as good as your child saying, "Way to go! You're accomplishing your goal. Please, keep it up! I might fall apart any second! Get popcorn!""

"It's extremely hard for good people to believe that anyone could be so cruel at heart, especially children. We want to believe just talking to them and helping them understand the effects of their behavior can turn them all around. Some of them can and will learn empathy, sure. Others never will."

"However, for some children, camp can be a nightmare if they experience bullying and they don't feel safe when they are away from home. Bullying thrives in unstructured atmospheres where supervision may feel looser, and camps can provide the perfect atmosphere for bullying to flourish, unfortunately. Kids generally have a lot more free time and possibilities to mingle with each other in camp, as opposed to school. In school, bullying happens about four times more often on the playground versus in the classroom, and camp can be like one giant playground. For example, bullying in camp occurs when supervision is lean: on the way to activities, during shower time, during free play, and when kids are in their cabins and counselors are not readily visible."

"How many times do we hear children speak about their summer being "great" because of their mentors, the counselors? What makes a great summer are the relationships the kids make. Besides friends, they want to feel accepted, loved, cared for, and connected to their staff. From my own work in the bullying arena, one can see where there's an obvious overriding problem: Most of the staff are teenagers and young adults. The average age of a counselor is nineteen to twenty-two, but in many camps, high school students are hired for theses jobs, even if it is in the counselor-in-training format. The potential problem that brings is that these counselors are not very far removed from the prime bullying years in their own lives. They don't necessarily yet have any insight about how to handle bullies, and they're still worried about their own popularity and social standing."

"Kids tend to know the social hierarchy in any group situation, whether that's at school, camp, or elsewhere. They figure out pretty quickly who's at the top of the ladder, who's in the middle, and who's on the bottom. So do counselors, even if they don't know it themselves, and counselors tend to align themselves with the ids at the top of the ladder. This is a normal human trait, wanting to connect with popularity. However, for a counselor, this issue has severe consequences, especially if it involves a child who is not a popular kid."

"If they hear hurtful talk, counselors should jump in and defend the target. If a group of girls make fun of a camper's clothing or hair, the counselor needs to say something like, "I think Eileen's hair is beautiful." If they try to keep a kid out of an activity, the counselor needs to step in and make sure the kid is included and not picked on. Counselors need to be vigilant about jumping in when they hear gossip, or any negative talk about other campers or even other counselors. When counselors jump into camp situations and say, "Hey, what's going on here?" or "Hey, what's up with that?" or "We don't talk about anyone behind their back" or "How would you feel if someone was saying that about you right now behind your back?" counselors see that their behavior has an impact. This kind of training helps counselors define who they are as models and gives them the power to stop bullying. More important, it shows campers who's in charge and what they can get away with."

"[M]orale is the spiritual capacity of a people to endure pain and suffering, and not a campaign of bill posters, pep talks and band concerts."

"An American general defined morale as "when a soldier thinks his army is the best in the world, his regiment the best in the army, his company the best in the regiment, his squad the best in the company, and that he himself is the best blankety-blank soldier man in the outfit.""

"Since 2009, $287 million has been spent on programs aimed at improving morale within the US military, which has shouldered two major overseas combat deployments over the past decade. But these efforts may have been largely fruitless, as 52% of soldiers across all branches remain "pessimistic about their future in the military," according to an April USA Today report."

"A Brookings Institution report notes: "Observers regularly fretted over low morale during the defense drawdown of the 1990s, during the start of the Iraq War, during the Iraq Surge, during the Afghanistan Surge; and at practically all the points in between ... After each report of troop morale hitting 'rock bottom,' troop morale seems to slip lower yet and, still, the military soldiers on.""

"Unit cohesion can be considered a contributor to morale. Manning reviews various definitions of the terms morale and esprit de corps and suggests that morale is best thought of as “the enthusiasm and persistence with which a member of a group engages in the prescribed activities of the group” (Manning, 1994). He suggests that esprit de corps is the counterpart to cohesion at the level of the organization rather than at the level of the primary unit and that cohesion and esprit de corps are each contributors to one’s morale."

"An official policy statement issued in 1940 by the War Department (predecessor of the Defense Department) said that intermingling the races would "produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense.""

"What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own."

"The failing of contemporary criticism is double: Hand in hand with the suppression of aesthetic autonomy, one finds also a growing reluctance to recognize the complex and dynamic temporality of literature."

"Periodization is the disciplinary strategy with which the present establishes its rule over all time and encourages conformism, to the detriment of autonomy, individual and aesthetic."

"The university ... must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy—the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature."

"He who feels that in his inmost being he cannot be compared with others, will be his own lawgiver. For one thing is needful: to give style to one’s character. This art is practised by him who, with an eye for the strong and weak sides of his nature, removes from it one quality and another, and then by daily practice and acquired habit replaces them by others which become second nature to him; in other words, he puts himself under restraint in order by degrees to bend his nature entirely to his own law."

"From none but self expect applause; He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws."

"Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he’s always ready to escape their control."

"There cannot be any politics of resistance, aesthetics of emancipation, or prose and poetry of agential autonomy in history for people around the world—nothing except a Starbucks Coffee version of the so-called “Western classics” to go and save them."

"We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational."

"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his."

"It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after our own. But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

"That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince."

"Autonomy means that the movement must be truly independent and a free association of all those united around common goals, rather than membership as the result of some oath or other pressure."

"Most business literature still views autonomy as a virtue, as though communication, teamwork, and cooperation were lesser values."

"I, who have the strength and awareness to be my own motive force, will not be the little cog that is overwhelmed, annihilated by the heavy social gears."

"The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies."

"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture and of the technique of life."

"The grimaces on these mocking distorted faces signalize disobedience, opposition and turmoil, as well as a kind of childlike autonomy in the depraved world of adults."

"The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations."

"Ursus had communicated to Homo a portion of his talents: such as to stand upright, to restrain his rage into sulkiness, to growl instead of howling, etc.; and on his part, the wolf had taught the man what he knew—to do without a roof, without bread and fire, to prefer hunger in the woods to slavery in a palace."

"Modernized poverty appears when the intensity of market dependence reaches a certain threshold. Subjectively, it is the experience of frustrating affluence which occurs in persons mutilated by their overwhelming reliance on the riches of industrial productivity. Simply, it deprives those affected by it of their freedom and power to act autonomously, to live creatively; it confines them to survival through being plugged into market relations. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is with difficulty expressed. We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language by which verbs that formerly designated satisfying actions are replaced by nouns that denote packages designed for passive consumption only: for example, "to learn" becomes "acquisition of credits." A profound change in individual and social self-images is here reflected. ... The peculiarly modern inability to use personal endowments, communal life, and environmental resources in an autonomous way infects every aspect of life where a professionally engineered commodity has succeeded in replacing a culturally shaped use-value. The opportunity to experience personal and social satisfaction outside the market is thus destroyed."

"He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy."

"Just as a man, as a social being, can not in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors."

"Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding."

"It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts."

"Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims."

"Reasoning is one of the highest powers of man. It is a mark of originality and intelligence, and stamps its possessor not a copier but an originator, not a follower but a leader, not a slave, to have his thinking foisted upon him by others, but a free and independent intellect, unshackled by the bonds of ignorance and convention. The man who employs reason in acquiring knowledge, finds delights in study that are denied to a rote memorizer. When one looks at the world through glasses of reason, inquiring into the eternal why, then facts take on a new meaning, knowledge comes with new power, the facts of experience glow with vitality, and one's own relations with them appear in a new light."

"Its ethic is liberty and its characteristic is autonomy — the freedom of the will from external constraint. It says "I shall..."

"Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves."

"Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. ... There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection. ... These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised."

"I wasn't good with authority, went to lots of schools, didn't like the fact that there was no autonomy."

"Τί δὲ καὶ ἀφ’ ἑαυτῶν οὐ κρίνετε τὸ δίκαιον;"

"The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. If the productive apparatus could be organized and directed toward satisfaction of the vital needs, its control might well be centralized, such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible."

"The student of social psychology ... is concerned not so much with the panaceas that may be proposed for the solution of the economic problems, but is interested rather in the possibility that under any economic system a maximum number of people should be able to grow from infantile tribal ways to self-directing maturity."

"I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table."

"The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion."

"There exists at present a living body, which is my body... I am one of those philosophers who have held that that ‘the Common Sense view of the world’ is in certain fundamental features, wholly true."

"George Edward Moore, in “A Defense of Common Sense” quoted in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid p. 319"

"Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs."

"In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. ... Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle."

"We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance."

"No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone."

"There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it."

"Is the intellect to be regarded as autonomous and self-sufficient, as pursuing ends of its own, and as judging by standards of its own? or is it to be regarded as the servant of alien interests which impose their ends and standards upon it? The modern tendency has been towards the latter or practical interpretation of the knowing faculties."

"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."

"I worship freedom; I abhor restraint, trouble, dependence. As long as the money in my purse lasts, it assures my independence; it relieves me of the trouble of finding expedients to replenish it, a necessity which has always inspired me with dread; but the fear of seeing it exhausted makes me hoard it carefully. The money which a man possesses is the instrument of freedom.; that which we eagerly pursue is the instrument of slavery. Therefore I hold fast to that which I have, and desire nothing."

"I neither want nor expect autonomy to lose its status in the centerpiece of bioethics. But that centerpiece of bioethics should be a whole bouquet of concepts, and not just the single flower of autonomy, however beguiling it may be."

"I'll never Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand, As if a man were author of himself And knew no other kin."

"Autonomy has never been recognized as a legally protectable interest. It has been vindicated only as byproduct of protection of two other interests – bodily security as protected by rules against consented contact, and bodily well-being as protected by rules governing professional competence."

"He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down."

"Again, it reduces someone's moral responsibility and intellectual autonomy to a racial stereotype — that all blacks are innocent victims who cannot be held responsible for their beliefs or arguments; or that all blacks are so oppressed that any bigotry they utter is permissible."

"Autonomy is traditionally regarded as the instrument of agency for individuals who are perceived as separate, independent and fully rationale."

"I have always been a strong supporter of patient’s autonomy in decision-making, particularly at the end of life and believe that this should be respected. By the same token, the doctor involved in the end-of-life decisions also has his autonomy to consider."

"But while I breathe Heaven's air, and Heaven looks down on me, And smiles at my best meanings, I remain Mistress of mine own self and mine own soul."

"It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending."

"They tell me I am here to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live."

"My parents have a wonderful marriage, but they have been together since my mother was 12, married when they were just teenagers and are barely ever separated. They even work together. As a result, I have always thought of marriage as involving the loss of a certain amount of autonomy."

"Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision."

"It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures."

"Thoreau's famous retreat to Walden Pond is thus in a continuum with his sense of the duty of disobedience. ... He understood this exile as the need to create a society—even if a society of one on the banks of a tiny Massachusetts pond—that he could willingly join."

"Among those who stressed the ‘autos’ were Kant’s early [[w:German Romanticism|Romantic followers and critics (usually both followers and critics at once) who thought that each of us should be the author of our own morality. My morality, therefore, is valid only for me, as an expression of my unique individuality. After all, a moral law proceeding from my will seems by that fact alone to be a law valid only for me, perhaps even a law whose content is subject to my whims and arbitrariness. But that leads to a natural question: How can a law bind me at all if I am its author, because that apparently puts me in a position to change or invalidate it at my own discretion? The same thoughts, once we try to answer this question, might also lead in the direction of associating the concept of moral authority with some notion of individual “authenticity,” “choosing oneself,” or “becoming who one is,” sometimes taking those who travel this road beyond morality entirely. For just that reason, however, the self-esteem which appears to ground Kantian morality can begin to seem (as it does to some of Kant’s critics) like a kind of arrogance or even a perverse self-deification, in which each person blasphemously usurps the traditional place of the Deity as the giver of moral laws. The tradition that went in this direction therefore included some, such as the later Schelling and Kierkegaard, whose encounter with Kantian ethics ended (paradoxically) in some form of “theonomy” or theological voluntarism that either preserved the notion of autonomy only by a speculative pantheist merging of the self and the Deity or else rejected outright (as a demonic or satanic principle) the whole idea that the rational creature might tear itself away from its creator and claim authority over itself."

"If, on the other hand, your primary goal is wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, and an intact world, then there's quite a lot wrong with it."

"How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual."

"Autonomy itself is not the monolithic concept it is sometimes imagined to be; as flower, instead of being simply an American Beauty, autonomy would be more of a varietal that come in several hues."

"In some ways autonomy, broadly defined, is not an enforceable right in any useful sense. It is the basis of all fundamental rights – namely to be able to behave and to be treated with the dignity that goes with being human, whatever one is, it is that self that commands respect. This underlies all of the rights of the European Convention. Privacy, freedom of expression etc., are the part-expression of this in positive law, for those situations in which the autonomous individual finds him or herself in the context of society. Then, the autonomy rights of one may clash with those of the other and one will give way. Given that it is the social context that will decide which right has the stronger claim, it must follow that many autonomy claims are unenforceable and privacy rights are weak."

"The Kantian idea of moral autonomy as “self-determination” is as good a place as any to begin elaborating the conception of personal autonomy I favour. The autonomous life cherished by liberals is the life that can be characterised as (in part) self-determined, self-authored or self-created, following plans and ideals - “a conception of the good” - that one has chosen for oneself. Choice, on this view, is prerequisite to leading a successful, fulfilling and authentic existence according to one's own moral rights. To have an autonomous life a person must be free to deliberate about and choose the projects he or she will take up in life from an adequate range of options accommodating the diversity of human aptitudes, abilities, interests and tastes. In contrast to the value of liberty conceived as the negative right to be left alone, that is an active, “positive” conception of autonomy which requires, as Rawls nearly summarised, the opportunity “to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of the good”. Jeremy Waldron helpfully expands: The dominant theme in modern liberalism is that an individual conception of the good life is a plan of life or a strategy for living that an individual uses as a basis for making and reflecting on his more important decisions and for scheduling his enjoyments and set backs (to the extent that he has any control over them). His conception, moreover, defines what is to count as a setback or any enjoyment for him; and it defines for him the things that are most, and least, important in his life."

"Autonomy makes a person the sovereign authority over her or his own life, in recognition of the fact that we each have only one life and that what happens in it – what happens to “us” - is our most special and intimate concern. Although political philosophers might sometimes make heavy weather of it, this is a perfectly familiar and comprehensible idea (as indeed it must be to qualify as a compelling personal and political ideal that can be taken to heart by people like us). Ronald Dworkin contributes the following memorable image: Each person follows a more or less articulate conception of what gives value to life. The scholar who values a life of contemplation has such a conception so does the television-watching, beer-drinking citizen who is fond of saying “This is the life”, though of course he has thought less about the issue and is less able to describe or defend his conception. Having a life-plan – or, more accurately, a “plan for living” - is part and parcel of living life “from the inside”, to borrow Kymlicka's useful metaphor."

"If privacy is an essential component of autonomy, and personal autonomy is such a cherished value for liberals and others, does that mean we must have a right to privacy? Alas, matters are not so simple. It certainly is “not” the case that people enjoy rights over everything that is important to them. In order to determine whether there is a (moral) right to privacy we had first better understand what a right is. The most illuminating conception of rights I know is the Interest Theory proposed by Joseph Raz, in these terms : Definition “X has a right” if and only if X can have rights, and, other things being equal, an aspect of X's well-being (his interest) is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty."

"A useful way to approach the idea of a right to privacy is to see how, in their essential structure as rights-generating grounds of duties, privacy interests resemble or overlap with the negative liberties of traditional political theory. Consider first, by way of contrast, how a positive right to autonomy might be specified. True, a right to have an autonomous life is a conceptual impossibility because nobody else can be under a duty to provide me with something that, by definition, I must do for myself. Only I can lead my life from the inside; nobody can coerce me into doing so, for coercion destroys genuine self-determination through external pressure, nor can I be relieved of the fundamentally personal responsibility for leading an autonomous life in any other way. However, it is possible to sidestep this conceptual objection by reconstituting the supposed entitlement as a right to be provided ith “the conditions and opportunities” for leading an autonomous life. This right is “conceptually” unproblematic, but has never (to my knowledge) been a moral or political reality in the history of the world. For nobody could claim such a right unless society's material and technical resources were such that the same right could be universalized to everyone, in accordance with the foundational moral norm of equal respect for persons. Once this “merely” contingent, but under current conditions impossibly demanding, matrial prerequisite is acknowledged, one is obliged to conclude, with Raz, that our mastery over the physical environment has not yet developed to the point where there could bea general right to be provided with the conditions for living an autonomous life: A right to autonomy can be had only in the interest of the right-holder justifies holding members of the society at large to be duty-bound to him to provide him with the social environment necessary to give him a chance to have an autonomous life. Assuming that the interest of one person cannot justify holding so many to be subject to potentially burdensome dutis, regarding such fundamental aspects of their lives, it follows that there is no right to personal autonomy. Personal autonomy may be a moral ideal . . . But in itself, in its full generality, it transcends what any individual has a right to. Put it another way: a person may be denied the chance to have an autonomous life, through the working of social institutions and by individual action, without any of his rights being overridden or violated."

"Autonomy has been defined in many ways. It has been treated as a synonym of freedom of the will, sovereignty, liberty and self-rule, or equated with self-knowledge, self-development, responsibility, dignity and integrity. It has been identified with self-assertion, critical reflection, freedom form obligation, absence of external causation and knowledge of one's own interests. The concept is related to actions, beleifs, reasons for acting, rules, the will of others, thoughts and principles. Gerald Dworkin's illuminating discussion of autonomy points out that the only consistent features in the variety of views and definitions of autonomy are that it is a desirable notion, that it relates to persons, and that the existence of a core meaning is doubtful. Many philosophers emphasise concepts such as freedom and self-definition when discussing autonomy. Thus, Dworkin suggests that autonomy enables people “to define their nature, give meaning and coherence to their lives and take responsibility for the kind of person they are”. John Rawls suggests that “acting autonomously is acting from principles that we would consent to as free and equal rational beings”."

"A similar notion is that the morally autonomous individual is one who obeys social norms not out of unthinking conformity, but as a result of an independent evaluation of their moral worth. John Harris identifies autonomy as the ability to control one's destiny by exercising one's faculties and John Finnis equates it with the ability to “exercise individual liberty to do what one pleases”. Judge Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit, in considering the lawfulness of the Washington law against assisted suicide, stated that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life”. A common thread to emerge from these definitions, and the definition that we shall adopt, is that autonomy is the capacity of individuals “to choose both the deisrable ends of their own lives and .. the means by which they pursue those ends.”."

"Autonomy is incapable of shoring up other interests unless one is willing to accept that it is justifiable. The right to autonomy has a rich history and transcends both deontological and consequentialist thinking. Autonomy is an individualistic concept and hence there is the tendency naturally to associate the right to autonomy or freedom of action with deontological theories."

"He states that autonomy is literally “self-government” and people are autonomous “to the extent to which they are able to control their own destiny, by the exercise of their own faculties”:"

"Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things"

"It is difficult to renounce the feeling of ownership; it is likewise difficult to overcome babbling."

"Is it possible that dialectics and materialism are only limitations? The development of consciousness brings us into closer contact with the entire mighty energy. Is it possible to think as before, with only half one's brain, not caring about the locked-up treasures?"

"Self-perfectment is the most difficult achievement. People inject into this process so many inconsistencies that the manifestation of true self-perfectment is obscured... Take the history of humanity. Observe how brief were the periods of materialism; they invariably ended in bloody convulsions. Indeed, the trend of thought became rebellious, and the correct path having been lost, crimes multiplied. Self-perfectment is possible only through refinement of consciousness by its seeking to surround itself with worthy manifestations."

"If we ask ourselves whether the concepts of materialism and idealism are understood correctly, we shall discover that they are not. People should know that matter is also spirit. Each of these states is but a manifestation of the one Primary Energy, and every attempt to separate them will fail. Materialism alone is a customary standard for the ignorant, and idealism alone is an equally meaningless banner in the hands of fools. The great evolution must not be demeaned. All the sciences should be summoned to a reasoning based upon solid foundations. Only by applying scientific methods will the significance of evolution be understood."

"Materialism is not a new doctrine. Apart from the schools of antiquity, no one is unaware of the materialistic attitude of many Renaissance thinkers. The philosophical literature that preceded and prepared the French Revolution was, so to speak, imbued with materialist philosophy: suffice it to mention the famous “System of Nature”, which was the standard work in the 18th century, and the works, not yet entirely outdated, of the famous Baron Holbach."

"Materialism and Spirituality: There are today three major human trends: First of all, a trend towards a spiritual and free way of life; secondly, a trend towards intellectual unfoldment; and lastly, a potent trend towards material living and aggression. At present, the last of these innate tendencies is in the saddle, with the second, the intellectual attitude, throwing its weight upon the side of the material goals. A relatively small group is throwing the weight of human aspiration upon the side of the spiritual values. The war between the pairs of opposites — materialism and spirituality — is raging fiercely. Only as men turn away from material aggression and towards spiritual objectives will the world situation change, and men — motivated by goodwill — force the aggressors back to their own place and release humanity from fear and force. We are today reaping the results of our own sowing. The recognition of the cause of the problem provides humanity with the opportunity to end it. The time has arrived in which it is possible to institute those changes in attitude which will bring an era of peace and goodwill, founded on right human relations. These two forces — materialism and spirituality — face each other. What will be the outcome? Will men arrest the evil and initiate a period of understanding, cooperation and right relationship, or will they continue the process of selfish planning and of economic and militant competition? This question must be answered by the clear thinking of the masses and by the calm and unafraid challenges of the democracies."

"Most materialists, even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist. They situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of diverse facts, without perceiving that in this way they gave in to an obsession with the ideal form of matter, with a form that was closer than any other to what matter should be. Dead matter, the pure idea, and God in fact answer a question in the same way (in other words perfectly, and as flatly as the docile student in a classroom)– a question that can only be posed by philosophers, the question of the essence of things, precisely of the idea by which things become intelligible."

"There are writers, who maintain, that the human frame is wholly corporeal, and that there is no good reason for distinguishing between the soul and the body of man. This doctrine has been called Materialism. If I could acquiesce in it, I should perhaps grant, that all human actions are necessary; because, being produced by one bodily part operating upon another, they must as really be the effects of mechanism, as the motions of a clock."

"There is one thing that is eating the heart out of India, and that is modern materialism. There is one thing which is poisoning the mind of India, and that is the kind of science which is the teacher of materialism and works against Spirituality in the mind. How should I be able to tell you of the moral regeneration of India unless first I can strike at that which is piercing her heart and sucking out her very lifeblood. So--as I have been trained in the science of the West, trained in the knowledge of the physical Universe which is so much used to make men believe that nothing but the physical remains--I take for my first subject this undermining of materialism by science, and I attack it with the weapons that were once used to build it up."

"A man who is a spiritual man--a religious teacher--regards the universe from the standpoint of the Spirit from which everything is seen as coming from the One. When he stands, as it were, in the centre, and he looks from the centre to the circumference, he stands at the point whence the force proceeds, and he judges of the force from that point of radiation and he sees it as one in its multitudinous workings, and knows the force is One; he sees it in its many divergencies, and he recognises it as one and the same thing throughout. Standing in the centre, in the Spirit, and looking outwards to the universe, he judges everything from the standpoint of the Divine Unity and sees every separate phenomenon, not as separate from the One but as the external expression of the one and the only Life. But science looks at the thing from the surface. It goes to the circumference of the universe and it sees a multiplicity of phenomena. It studies these separated things and studies them one by one. It takes up a manifestation and judges it; it judges it apart; it looks at the many, not at the One; it looks at the diversity, not at the Unity, and sees everything from outside and not from within: it sees the external difference and the superficial portion while it sees not the One from which every thing proceeds."

"Study in one school of psychology came to what seemed a terrible conclusion. It was the school of Lombroso in Italy. He declared, and many others followed him, that the visions of the prophets, of the saints, of the seers, all their testimony to the existence of superphysical worlds, were the products of disordered brains, of diseased or over-strained nervous apparatus. He went further, and he declared that the manifestation known as genius was closely allied to insanity, that the brain of the genius and the brain of the madman were akin, until the phrase "genius is allied to madness," became the stock axiom of that school."

"When men tell us that the great religious teachers are neuropaths, that Buddha, Christ, S. Francis, are neuropaths, then we are inclined to cast our lot with the abnormal few, rather than with the normal many. We know what they were. They were men who saw far more and knew far more than we; what matters it whether we call their brains normal or abnormal? In these men's consciousness is a ray of the Divine splendour; as Browning says: Through such souls alone God, stooping, shows sufficient of His Light For us in the dark to rise by. And if in those cases the brain change from a normal to an abnormal state, then humanity must ever remain thankful to abnormality. That was the first answer which may be made to this statement of Lombroso, and you find a man like Dr. Maudsley, the famous doctor, asking whether there is any law that nature shall use only for her purposes what we call the perfect brains? May it not be that for her higher performances she needs brains which are different from the ordinary, the normal brains of man?"

"It must be remembered... that (the Theosophical Society) ...was intended to stem the current of materialism... For by “materialism” is meant not only an anti-philosophical negation of pure spirit, and, even more, materialism in conduct and action — brutality, hypocrisy, and, above all, selfishness — but also the fruits of a disbelief in all but material things, a disbelief which has increased enormously during the last century, and which has led many, after a denial of all existence other than that in matter, into a blind belief in the materialization of Spirit. The tendency of modern civilization is a reaction towards animalism, towards a development of those qualities which conduce to the success in life of man as an animal in the struggle for animal existence. Theosophy seeks to develop the human nature in man in addition to the animal, and at the sacrifice of the superfluous animality which modern life and materialistic teachings have developed to a degree which is abnormal for the human being at this stage of his progress."

"He was troubled by materialism."

"Here is an untaught ordinary person, who has no regard for the noble ones and is unskilled and undisciplined. ... He conceives himself as earth, he conceives himself in earth, he conceives himself apart from earth, he conceives earth to be ‘mine,’ he delights in earth. Why is that? Because he has not fully understood it, I say. ... He conceives himself in beings, he conceives himself apart from beings, he conceives beings to be ‘mine,’ he delights in beings. Why is that? Because he has not fully understood it, I say."

"Any kind of material form whatever, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all material form should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”"

"Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty-and all the values the derive from beauty-are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar."

"There is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine. The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel."

"But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts."

"The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe."

"Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal."

"From our vantage, materialism is not a neutral, value-free, minimalist position from which to pursue inquiry. Rather, it is itself an ideology with an agenda. What’s more, it requires an evolutionary creation story to keep it afloat. On scientific grounds, we regard that creation story to be false. What’s more, we regard the ideological agenda that has flowed from it to be destructive to rational discourse. Our concerns are therefore entirely parallel to the evolutionists’. Indeed, all the evolutionists’ worst fears about what the world would be like if we succeed have, in our view, already been realized through the success of materialism and evolution. Hence, as a strategy for unseating materialism and evolution, the term "Wedge" has come to denote an intellectual and cultural movement that many find congenial."

"Materialistically bound, traditional science assumes that anything that cannot be measured, tested in a laboratory, or probed by the five senses or their technological extensions simply doesn't exist. It's "not real." The consequence: all of reality has been collapsed into physical reality. Spiritual, or what I would call nonphysical, dimensions of reality have been run out of town.... This clashes with the "perennial philosophy," that philosophical consensus spanning ages, religions, traditions, and cultures, which describes different but continuous dimensions of reality. These run from the most dense and least conscious - what we'd call "matter" - to the least dense and most conscious, which we'd call spiritual. ... "Where's the proof of this Greater Reality?" you ask. I offer only an analogy: A battery of scientists can get together and tell you about all the scientific proof for the fact that bananas are bitter. But all you have to do is taste one, once, to realize that there is this whole other aspect to bananas. Ultimately, proof lies not in intellectual arguments, but in being touched in some way by the sacred within and without. Eckhart Tolle masterfully opens us to that possibility."

"I recently listened to a talk by a famous biologist. He spoke about... scientific materialism and religious transcendentalism. He said, "...they are incompatible and mutually exclusive." This seems to be a widely accepted view... I do not share it. I do not know what the word "materialism" means. ...I judge matter to be an imprecise and ...old-fashioned concept ...[M]atter is the way particles behave when a large number of them are lumped together. When we examine matter in the finest detail in experiments of particle physics, we see it behaving as an active agent... Its actions are... unpredictable. It makes what appear to be arbitrary choices between alternative possibilities. Between matter... and mind... there seems to be only a difference of degree... We stand... midway between the unpredictability of matter and the unpredictability of God. This view... may not be true, but it is... logically consistent and compatible with... experiments of modern physics. Therefore... scientific materialism and religious transcendentalism are neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive. We have learned that matter... does not limit God's freedom to make it do what he pleases."

"Materialism in its literal sense is long since dead. But its place has been taken by other philosophies which represent a virtually equivalent outlook. The tendency today is not to reduce everything to manifestations of matter—since matter now has only a minor place in the physical world—but to reduce it to manifestations of the operation of natural law... laws of the type prevailing in geometry, mechanics, and physics which are found to have this common characteristic—that they are ultimately reducible to mathematical equations. ...[T]hey are laws which, unlike human law, are never broken. It is the belief in the universal dominance of scientific law which is nowadays generally meant by materialism."

"The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind."

"This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world."

"To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs."

"There must be something in it, as yet totally ununderstood by us, perhaps something founded on a totally unknown relationship between body and spirit. For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us."

"...a great reformer of the Hebrew code of religion, it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being."

"Materialism sets us free from sin-by proving that there is no such thing as sin. There's just antisocial behavior, which we can control with measures like laws and educational programs.”"

"In a nation as ours where we stress mass production, and that's mighty important, where we have so many conveniences and luxuries and all of that, there is the danger that we will unconsciously forget about God. I'm not saying that these things aren't important; we need them, we need cars, we need money; all of that's important to live. But whenever they become substitutes for God, they become injurious."

"I understand that you have an economic system in America known as Capitalism. Through this economic system you have been able to do wonders. You have become the richest nation in the world, and you have built up the greatest system of production that history has ever known. All of this is marvelous, but Americans, there is the danger that you will misuse your Capitalism. I still contend that money can be the root of all evil. It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism. I am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life."

"The first and most fatal of all misconceptions about death is the idea that it is the end of all things; that there is nothing in man which survives it. Many people seem to be under the impression that this gross form of materialism has almost died out from among us; that it was a mental disease of the earlier part of the last century, and that the race has now outgrown it. It is much to be wished that this view represented the facts of the case, but I fear a careful student of contemporary thought can hardly endorse it."

"It is happily true that this noxious weed of materialism no longer - rears its, head in high places with the confidence of yore, for the men whose opinion is worthy of attention have by this time learnt better than that. But there is still an immense mass of blank ignorance in the world, and, worse still, there is much of that most objectionable of all forms of ignorance which, having picked up a few scientific catch-words, inflates itself with aggressive self-conceit and believes itself in possession of the wisdom of the ages. Among the unfortunate beings who are suffering under that variety of mental thralldom there is even yet much of the crudest materialism."

"The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind."

"Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects."

"The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist."

"The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

"The materialist doctrine, that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances."

"Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society."

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

"Individually, people are finding that a simpler lifestyle provides greater satisfaction than relentless pursuit of materialism."

"People have forgotten, or rather do not want to admit, the great cosmic significance of love. The materialism of our age puts love on the level of a purely physiological function. At best, love today is treated as a psychological process. But if the cosmic significance of love could be realized once more, people would see in love its highest function, i.e., the awakening of all the highest emotions and creative abilities."

"Our poor humanity, with its one-sided preoccupation with materialism (the church, too, serves materialistic bases and demands) needs more than ever before the realization of the Higher World and the leading concept of the Guru-Hierarch. Humanity's disease is chaotic thinking and lack of self-discipline. The slaves of yesterday revolt primarily against the leading concept, against discipline, and against cooperation. Only a king of the spirit realizes the significance of Hierarchy, for, in order to rule, one must first learn to obey. The principle of the leading concept must be affirmed in the consciousness of humanity if it wishes to progress."

"We need leadership that can elevate religion and morality to their position of paramount importance and thus eliminate growing selfishness, immorality and materialism."

"You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town."

"An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited."

"Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness."

"Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem."

"Hi, I'm Oscar. You might think you know, but you have no idea. [rap music] Welcome to my crib. The good life, the way the other half lives. Check it out, I got my 60" inch high-def, flatscreen TV with 6-speaker surround-sound, CD, DVD, PlayStation hook-up, and an 8-track player for days when you're feeling just a little... [beatbox] old school. [laughs] 'Cause even a superstar Mack daddy fish like me has to have the necessities."

"In the course of the 19th Century there was a great upsurge of natural-scientific thinking and all its attendant results. One of the first results was theoretical materialism accompanied by atheism. It can be said that the materialists of the 19th Century positively revelled in atheism."

"Any lifeform in any realm – mineral, vegetable, animal, or human – can be said to undergo “enlightenment.” It is, however, an extremely rare occurrence since it is more than an evolutionary progression: It also implies a discontinuity in its development, a leap to an entirely different level of Being and, most important, a lessening of materiality. What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light. Some carbons, under inconceivable heat and pressure, turn into diamonds, and some heavy minerals into other precious stones. p. 6"

"Newborn lifeforms – babies, puppies, kittens, lambs, and so on... are fragile, delicate, not yet firmly established in materiality. An innocence, a sweetness and beauty that are not of this world still shine through them. They delight even relatively insensitive humans. p. 8"

"Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality? p. 8"

"Space consciousness represents not only freedom from ego, but also from dependency on the things of this world, from materialism and materiality. It is the spiritual dimension which alone can give transcendent and true meaning to this world. p. 138"

"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda."

"As soon as somebody or something stands out as excellent, the other shout goes up: 'Elitism!' And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. 'Standing out' is undemocratic."

"Hobbes’s psychology treated what he called vainglory as a pathological condition based on ignorance of man’s vulnerability, on unjustified confidence. This condition can, according to him, be cured by liberal doses of fear. One need only hear what is said today … to recognize how much of modernity is devoted to unmanning this disposition. Elitism is the catch-all epithet expressing our disapproval of the proud and the desire to be first. But, unsupported and excoriated, this part of the soul lives on, dwelling underground, receiving no sublimating education. As with all repressed impulses, it has its daily effects on personality and also occasionally bursts forth in various disguises and monstrous shapes. Much of modem history can be explained by the search of what Plato called spiritedness for legitimate self-expression."

"The Left Elite only pretend to be concerned about what's best for everyone else because it is the most effective way to manipulate you and your children into their abyss."

"What you're saying is that 'I, the superior elite, will take care of you.' Why? Because, you see, that superior, elite group needs to feel superior and elite. And they can't be superior and elite unless you have a whole lot of people down there groveling around. So you keep them down there by feeding them."

"Obviously those who burn to be professional jesters mean that they want to be successful comedians. And those are always an elite, microscopic portion of the population. But oh, how they try."

"We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world."

"What is the U.S. government looking for? And the elite governing this country? They're looking for oil."

"There are people in government who don't want other people to know what they know. It's just another example of elitism. And I spit on elitism. Show me an elitist, and I'll show you a loser."

"The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a [[*The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people."

"This is one of my pet peeves: Countries that will not tax their elite who expect us to come in and help them serve their people are just not going to get the kind of help from us that historically they may have."

"If you believe, as I do, that on the whole ordinary people are more competent than anyone else to decide when and how much they shall intervene on decisions they feel are important to them, then you will surely opt for political equality and democracy. But if you believe that the ordinary person is less competent in this fundamental way than some particular person or minority, then I imagine that like Plato your vision of the best government is a government by this qualified person or elite."

"There's something strange about theater. My characters consistently demonize elitism, but of course it's taking place in a theater where only so many people can see it. I've been in silly popcorn movies - the kind of thing that as an actor you might feel embarrassed about - but those movies reach many more people."

"Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."

"The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election."

"Part of why the Tea Party so deeply threatened the elite media is the tea party looked around and suddenly realized, there are more of us than there are of them."

"I know very well that we are not all equal, nor can be so; but it is my opinion that he who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble, in order to maintain their respect, is as much to blame as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat."

"Elitism is repulsive when based upon external and artificial limitations like race, gender, or social class. Repulsive and utterly false—for that spark of genius is randomly distributed across all cruel barriers of our social prejudice. We therefore must grant access—and encouragement—to everyone; and must be increasingly vigilant, and tirelessly attentive, in providing such opportunities to all children. We will have no justice until this kind of equality can be attained. But if only a small minority respond, and these are our best and brightest of all races, classes, and genders, shall we deny them the pinnacle of their soul's striving because all their colleagues prefer passivity and flashing lights? Let them lift their eyes to hills of books, and at least a few museums that display the full magic of nature's variety. What is wrong with this truly democratic form of elistim?"

"As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our center ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished."

"Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated."

"And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic."

"The common elements of fascism, such as extreme nationalism, social Darwinism, the leadership principle, elitism, anti-liberalism, anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, intolerance, glorification of war, the supremacy of the state and anti-intellectualism, together form of a rather loose doctrine."

"The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism. Ecopopulism … To change our laws and culture, the green movement justice, political solutions and social change."

"Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism."

"This distinguished corruption will teach the distinguished person that he exists only for the distinguished, that he is to live only in the alliance of their circles, that he must not exist for other people, just as they must not exist for him."

"The distinguished person ... may very well use an exaggerated courtesy toward the more lowly, but he must never associate with them as equals, since that would express that he was—human, but he is—distinguished."

"Chinks in America's EGALITARIAN armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism."

"Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it."

"This school used to be a bastion of rich, white elitism. And now... now they let homosexuals on the football team. Whining minorities run the student government. And you can't even coerce a woman into having sex with you without being brought up on charges."

"People with advantages ... come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite, and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves."

"Mozart composed his music not for the elite, but for everybody."

"Everyone should have the same opportunity, and in many areas that's not the case because programs are built around the elite."

"Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?"

"Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers."

"I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking."

"There's a very small group of elite actresses who are my age, who people want to work with. It's not easy to get a good job with good actors."

"By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, plot and narrative and character in fiction, the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience. They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite."

"The decadent writer writes shamelessly of himself, convinced that his life is special enough to impress those who have … made miserable by frankness, his handsome condescension, his elitism, and his perfect lack of candor were fatal gifts, ..."

"Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to."

"In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites."

"In every election cycle that I can recall, there comes a moment - or a few - where charges of elitism and claims of commonness are wielded by presidential candidates like a sword and shield: 'Vote for me 'cause I'm one of you. It's the other guy who's out of touch.'"

"The only genuine elite is the elite of those men and women who gave their lives to justice and charity."

"Millions of South Africans live in grueling, demeaning, dehumanizing poverty, while black empowerment seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled."

"Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good."

"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production."

"Being slim is the new elitism. Thinness today says that you are richer, smarter and more successful than the overweight masses. With our lives and food chain set up to make us fat -- I mean, you can't drive down any highway in America and find a grapefruit -- a guy needs to be smarter and more determined to get lean. So telling people you lost weight is telling them, Hey, I can outwit the world; I can beat the system."

"While lovelessness is not usually named by sociologists as an aspect of alienation, it may be the primary factor. For without relationships with significant others, meaning, self-esteem, a sense of belonging expressed in the establishment of norms and experienced as a sense of power cannot exist."

"Perhaps the most destructive aspect of alienation is that: the loss of power, of control over one’s destiny, over one’s memories, thoughts, relationships, past, and future. For in a world where no normative understandings apply, where one is perceived as futile and unwanted, where one’s perceptions are denied by acquaintance and stranger alike, where pain is the single most familiar sensation, the loss of self is experienced continually and, finally, desperately."

"There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it; every old language is immediately compromised, and every language becomes old once it is repeated."

"As a source of illumination, ganja has become an instrument in the war against Babylon and Babylonian consciousness. Its use, therefore, plays a major role in the de-alienation and decolonization of the African mind."

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

"I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it."

"By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts — but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively."

"Dem Reichen übergibt der Baumeister mit dem Schlüssel des Palastes alle Bequemlichkeit und Behäbigkeit, ohne irgend etwas davon mitzugenießen. Muß sich nicht allgemach auf diese Weise die Kunst von dem Künstler entfernen, wenn das Werk wie ein ausgestattetes Kind nicht mehr auf den Vater zurückwirkt? Und wie sehr mußte die Kunst sich selbst befördern, als sie fast allein mit dem öffentlichen, mit dem, was allen und also auch dem Künstler gehörte, sich zu beschäftigen bestimmt war!"

"There's a huge dichotomy between people who grow up with alienation, which, for me, was invaluable, and people who grow up so completely privileged that it breeds this complacency and lack of desire to question or challenge or do anything significant. Those are the types of people who become partners at the corporate law firms."

"The Simpsons' is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but who drive you completely crazy."

"Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country."

"The fate of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature."

"In the final analysis alienation is, among other things a response to the frustration created by the lack of meaning in modern society."

"We have to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment."

"The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency."

"We, we know the individuality that isolates the man from other men, the either/or, the lonely-one that leads the flesh to clothing, jewelry, and land, the solitude of sight that separates the people from the people, flesh from flesh, that jams material between the spirit and the spirit. We have suffered witness to these pitiful, and murdering, masquerade extensions of the self.Instead, we choose a real, a living enlargement of our only life. We choose community."

"Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings."

"We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves."

"The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.”"

"If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. … The individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own."

"Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence, this essence dominates him and he worships it."

"What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? First, in the fact that labor is external to the worker, that is, that it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel well but unhappy, does not freely develop his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker, therefore, feels himself only outside his work, and feels beside himself in his work. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His work therefore is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that labor is shunned like the plague as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion."

"Though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion."

"The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being."

"Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment.“"

"A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labour, from his life activity and from his species life is that man is alienated from other men. When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man’s relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labour"

"The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognises alienation as its own instrument and in it it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence."

"Without alienation, there can be no politics."

"We carry faithfully what one gives us to bear, on hard shoulders and over rough mountains. And should we sweat, we are told “Yes, life is a grave burden.” But man is only a grave burden to himself! That is because he carries on his shoulders too much that is alien to him. … Especially the strong, reverent spirit that would bear much: he loads too many alien grave words and values on himself."

"Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation."

"The polypoid character of the Greek states, in which every individual enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism, now made way for an ingenious clock-work, in which out of the piecing together of innumerable but lifeless parts, a mechanical kind of collective life ensued. State and church, laws and customs were now torn asunder; enjoyment was divorced from labor, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge."

"The Cathedral in Mayence is so shut in by the houses that are built round about it, that there is no one spot from which you can see it as a whole. This is symbolic of everything great or beautiful in the world. It ought to exist for its own sake alone, but before very long it is misused to serve alien ends. People come from all directions wanting to find in it support and maintenance for themselves; they stand in the way and spoil its effect. To be sure, there is nothing surprising in this, for in a world of need and imperfection everything is seized upon which can be used to satisfy want. Nothing is exempt from this service, no, not even those very things which arise only when need and want are for a moment lost sight of—the beautiful and the true, sought for their own sakes."

"For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again."

"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up."

"The whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the measures of this wild merry song with its shouts and whistles and clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and mirthfulness; he longed to take part in the expression of this joy of life. But he could do nothing, and had to lie and look on and listen. When the peasants, with their singing, had vanished out of sight and hearing, a weary feeling of despondency at his own isolation, his physical inactivity, his alienation from this world, came over Levin."

"Majorities are of two sorts: (1) Communal majority and (2) political majority. A political majority is changeable in its class composition. A political majority grows. A communal majority is born. The admission to a political majority is open. The door in a communal majority is closed. The politics of political majority are free to all to make and unmake. The politics of community majority are made by its own members born in it."

"A young man is not an appropriate hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life."

"The market (the peaceful competition for the acquisition of goods) requires the prior existence of the social contract (the agreement to abide by contracts and the establishment of a judge to arbitrate and enforce contracts) without which men are in a state of war. The market presupposes the existence of law and the absence of war. War was the condition of man prior to the existence of civil society, and the return to it is always possible. The force and fraud required to end war have nothing to do with the market and are illegitimate within it. The rational behavior of men at peace, in which economics specializes, is not the same as the rational behavior of men at war, as was so tellingly pointed out by Machiavelli. Political science is more comprehensive than economics because it studies both peace and war and their relations. The market cannot be the sole concern of the polity, for the market depends on the polity, and the establishment and preservation of the polity continuously requires reasonings and deeds which are “uneconomic” or “inefficient.” Political action must have primacy over economic action, no matter what the effect on the market. … Economics deals only with the bourgeois. … The warlike man is not within its ken. Political science remains the only social science discipline which looks war in the face."

"It is difficult to see why the most advantageous political system, for the present, would not be a democratic state with an artistocratic government, provided only the artistocracy be that of real merit, and not of artificial qualities. If this be not the real principle of the republican form of government then I must confess that I do not know what its principle is."

"After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the "sense of utter irresponsibility" shown by the demonstrators. He had nothing to say then, nor has he since, about the "sense of utter irresponsibility" shown by Senator Mansfield and others who stand by quietly and vote appropriations as the cities and villages of North Vietnam are demolished, as millions of refugees in the South are driven from their homes by American bombardment. He has nothing to say about the moral standards or the respect for international law of those who have permitted this tragedy. I speak of Senator Mansfield precisely because he is not a breast-beating superpatriot who wants America to rule the world, but is rather an American intellectual in the best sense, a scholarly and reasonable man -- the kind of man who is the terror of our age. Perhaps this is merely a personal reaction, but when I look at what is happening to our country, what I find most terrifying is not Curtis LeMay, with his cheerful suggestion that we bomb everybody back into the stone age, but rather the calm disquisitions of the political scientists on just how much force will be necessary to achieve our ends, or just what form of government will be acceptable to us in Vietnam. What I find terrifying is the detachment and equanimity with which we view and discuss an unbearable tragedy. We all know that if Russia or China were guilty of what we have done in Vietnam, we would be exploding with moral indignation at these monstrous crimes."

"The political scientist, in so far as he wishes to remain a scientist, is limited to the study of techniques. A good deal of what is called political science, I must confess, seems, to me a device, invented by academic persons, avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science."

"Today political science is often said to be ‘descriptive’ or ‘empirical,’ concerned with facts; political philosophy is called ‘normative’ because it expresses values. But these terms merely repeat in more abstract form the difference between political science, which seeks agreement, and political philosophy, which seeks the best."

"Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I.R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment..."

"Political science is governed by five myths: (1) that it studies politics; (2) that it is scientific; (3) that it is possible to study politics separated off from economics, sociology, psychology and history; (4) that the state in our democratic capitalist society is politically neutral, i.e. available as a set of institutions and mechanisms to whatever group wins the election; and (5) that political science, as a discipline, advances the cause of democracy."

"The revelation that systems organize on their own sat poorly with the apostles of social sciences—especially political scientists who base their theories on imposing external controls to achieve selected political goals. They are accustomed to thinking about government-produced certainties, not ambiguous probabilities. In their linear calculations, humanity must be physically forced to follow the guiding light of political leaders or flavor-of-the-month ideologies. The economy and human actions must march in step with legislative or dictated law, no matter what the outcome. Yet natural systems do not operate this way."

"Apart from economics and geography, it is hard to find a social science that has given less attention to religion than political science."

"The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions."

"The new religious consciousness rises up against the nihilistic attitude towards the world and mankind. ... We believe in the objective, the cosmic might of the truth of God, in the possibility according to God to guide the earthly destiny of mankind. This will be the victory of the true theocracy, whether over a false democratism, — the apotheosis of the quantitative collectivity of human wills, or so also over the false theocraticism, — all that apotheosis of the human will within Caesaropapism or Papocaesarism."

"The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another."

"There is something deeply troubling about a culture which makes humans into gods, and which puts people on pedestals to be worshipped. For, it glosses over all blemishes in its quest for the godly."

"It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself."

"It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves."

"For modern man, … pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. … In effect his becomes a deification of his own will; man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God."

"Revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it."

"Revolt is not integrated into the harmonious development of the world; it does not wish to be integrated but rather to explode at the heart of the world and to break its continuity."

"We have to distinguish between riots and revolts.… Riots are illegal. A revolt is legitimate because it is what people must do to express self-defense, self-determination, and self-direction."

"The explosion of peaceful, mass revolt which has ended Soviet rule from Berlin to Bucharest — and will shortly end it also from Lvov to Vladivostok — was set off not by the eloquence of charismatic leaders, not by hatred of the oppressors, not by hope of gain, but by that tiny yet searing flame which is in us all, and which no Niagara of oppression, hunger or torture can ever extinguish."

"Widely dispersed knowledge concerning the important role of basic cooperative processes among living beings may lead to the acceptance of cooperation as a guiding principle both in social theory and as a basis for human behavior. Such a development when it occurs will alter the course of human history."

"Saint-Simon leaves a legacy which affects all socialisms, for he introduces into social theory (he theme of idleness and parasitism as social problems consequent on the evasion of the central social responsibility ascribed to citizens: the duty to be productive."

"Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for."

"The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny."

"I have tried to show that psychiatric research can be empirical and experimental, controlled, and operational and not dependent on inferences, analogies, or anecdotes. Hypotheses can be derived which are testable. Theory is a different matter. At the present we rely heavily on psychoanalytic theory or on still poorly formulated and defined general systems theory, information theory, or transactional theory. To explain the depth and variety of the interrelationship of somatopsychosocial facets of the totality of human behavior in process requires a unified theory of human behavior which we have not yet even approached. Integration or synthesis of biological, psychological, and social theory is not enough."

"… a rather different class of applications of the idea of best allocation of scarce resources... usually referred to as the theory of optimal economic growth. In most studies of this kind made in the countries with market economies there is not an identifiable client to whom the findings are submitted as policy recommendations. Nor is there an obvious choice of objective function, such as cost minimization or profit maximization in the studies addressed to individual enterprises. The field has more of a speculative character. The models studied usually contain only a few highly aggregated variables. One considers alternative objective functions that incorporate or emphasize various strands of ethical, political, or social thought. These objectives are then tried out to see what future paths of the economy they imply under equally simplified assumptions of technology or resource availability."

"The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. … [S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. … Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science."

"Jurgen Habermas is widely considered as the most influential thinker in Germany over the past decade. As a philosopher and sociologist he has mastered and creatively articulated an extraordinary range of specialized literature in the social sciences, social theory and the history of ideas in the development of a comprehensive and provocative critical theory of knowledge and human interests. His roots are in the tradition of German thought from Kant to Marx, and he has been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theorists which pioneered in the study of the relationship of the ideas of Marx and Freud."

"Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced to rubble — kilometers of streets on which there remained no trace of life, not even a cat, not even a homeless dog — emerged with a rather ironic attitude toward descriptions of the hell of the big city by contemporary poets, descriptions of the hell in their own souls. A real "wasteland" is much more terrible than any imaginary one. Whoever has not dwelt in the midst of horror and dread cannot know how strongly a witness and participant protests against himself, against his own neglect and egoism. Destruction and suffering are the school of social thought."

"Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself. We talk of the good of society. Is this something apart from, and transcending, the good of the individuals composing it? If the individual is ignored and sacrificed for what is considered the good of the society, is that the right objective to have? It was agreed that the individual should not be sacrificed and indeed that real social progress will come only when opportunity is given to the individual to develop, provided "the individual" is not a selected group but comprises the whole community. The touchstone, therefore, should be how far any political or social theory enables the individual to rise above his petty self and thus think in terms of the good of all. The law of life should not be competition or acquisitiveness but cooperation, the good of each contributing to the good of all."

"A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed. In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set."

"We are all familiar with the passionate and closely argued appeal against censorship by the outstanding Soviet writer A. Solzhenitsyn.He as well as G. Vladimov, G. Svirsky, and other writers who have spoken out on the subject have clearly shown how incompetent censorship destroys the living soul of Soviet literature, but the same applies of course to all other manifestations of social thought, causing stagnation and dullness and preventing fresh and deep ideas. Such ideas, after all, can arise only in discussion, in the face of objections, only if there is a potential possibility of expressing not only true but also dubious ideas. This was clear to the philosophers of ancient Greece and hardly anyone nowadays would have any doubts on that score. But after fifty years of complete domination over the minds of an entire nation, our leaders seem to fear even allusions to such a discussion."

"The dominant social thought shapes the institutionalized order of society... and the malfunctioning of established institutions in turn alters social thought."

"Islam is the first school of social thought that recognizes the masses as the basis, the fundamental and conscious factor in determining history and society not the elect as Nietzsche thought, not the aristocracy and nobility as Plato claimed, nor great personalities as Carlyle and Emerson believed, not those of pure blood as Alexis Carrel imagined, not the priests or the intellectuals, but the masses.""

"I shall treat anarchism, despite its many variations: as a system of social thought, aiming at fundamental changes in the structure of society and particularly — for this is the common element uniting all its forms — at the replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of non-governmental cooperation between free individuals."

"Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. ... To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated; the class instinct of the , and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized."

"Capitalists preach “the market” for the working class – stand on your own two feet, don’t rely on the government – but themselves sponge off the public big time. Just look at the billions in subsidies and tax concessions the fossil fuel companies, huge enterprises for the most part, extract from state and federal governments in Australia. The vehicle manufacturers raked in hundreds of millions a year from the for decades until deciding it wasn’t enough and went overseas. This is why big companies and industry groups hire armies of former politicians to lobby on their behalf in the offices of premiers and prime ministers – there’s money in government coffers and they want it. And while the capitalists talk about “the market” setting wages for workers, in reality, they don’t really allow the market to do the job. They use the whole apparatus of state repression, the industrial tribunals, the police, the courts to suppress workers’ rights to organise to pursue their demands. But when a crisis hits all the bullshit about the market is thrown to the winds. And that is just what we are seeing now. Faced with the collapse of the capitalist economy, for the second time in a dozen years, with massive bankruptcies on the table and the stock market plunging by more than 30 percent and more to come, fervent advocates of the free market are now embracing government intervention to save their skins."

"Workers every day face their own personal crises – lack of money to pay the rent or the possibility of defaulting on their mortgage because the boss didn’t call them in for work this week, overdue utility bills that must be paid or risk being cut off, expenses for children’s education that fall due, the fear of redundancy. These are crises that are experienced personally but are really a collective crisis of everyday life for working class people. But when we ask for governments to respond, we are told that addressing these things collectively is not possible, and that this is just the way things are. But when the capitalist system goes into crisis, governments act promptly. It turns out that political decisions about the economy are possible and it is wholly possible for governments to tell the markets to go jump."

"The most important word in the language of the working class is solidarity."

"¡Obrero que alzas el mundo!/¡Obrero que todo entintas!/¡Mano que empuja el futuro"

"Capitalism is an exploitative system, as Marx has argued so cogently, and as anyone who studies the inequalities within and between the countries of the world today must see. It is therefore a priori likely that its ideology conceals realities that if known would make the exploited militant."

"The working class is the victim of a conspiracy aimed at crushing them, and when there is a conspiracy to crush the working class, it’s the Church’s duty to intervene. We value people more than capital."

"In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a handicap and, to the extent that he cares what the persons think of him or has internalised the dominant middle-class attitudes toward , he may be expected to feel some 'shame'."

"Was ist der Kommunismus? Der Kommunismus ist die Lehre von den Bedingungen der Befreiung des Proletariats. Was ist das Proletariat? Das Proletariat ist diejenige Klasse der Gesellschaft, welche ihren Lebensunterhalt einzig und allein aus dem Verkauf ihrer Arbeit und nicht aus dem Profit irgendeines Kapitals zieht; deren Wohl und Wehe, deren Leben und Tod, deren ganze Existenz von der Nachfrage nach Arbeit, also von dem Wechsel der guten und schlechten Geschäftszeiten, von den Schwankungen einer zügellosen Konkurrenz abhängt."

"The costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life."

"The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. ... The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. ... The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. ... The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. ... The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences."

"Bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day."

"The continual subjugation of the masses depends on competition and internal disunity. As long as discrimination exists, and racial or ethnic minorities are oppressed, the entire working class is oppressed and weakened. This is so because the Capitalist class is able to use racism to drive down the wages of individual segments of the working class by inciting racial antagonism and forcing a fight for jobs and services. This division is a development that ultimately undercuts the living standards of all workers. Moreover, by pitting whites against Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, the Capitalist class is able to prevent workers from uniting against their common class enemy. As long as workers are fighting each other, Capitalist class rule is secure."

"The sex life of the working class is nasty, brutish and short. Every survey of behaviour, whether it's sexual offences or marital behaviour or premarital behaviour shows that. I had a dear friend who used to say 'tell me how a man makes love and I'll tell you how he votes', and that is absolutely justified in terms of what we know about class attitude and conduct in sexual matters."

"Global capitalists have turned back the clock to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The working class is increasingly bereft of rights, blocked from forming unions, paid starvation wages, subject to wage theft, under constant surveillance, fired for minor infractions, exposed to dangerous carcinogens, forced to work overtime, given punishing quotas and abandoned when they are sick and old. Workers have become, here and abroad, disposable cogs to corporate oligarchs, who wallow in obscene personal wealth that dwarfs the worst excesses of the Robber Barons."

"Amazon workers, like many American workers, endure appalling work conditions. They are forced to work compulsory 12-hour shifts. They are denied bathroom breaks, often urinating into bottles. They endure stifling temperatures inside the warehouse in the summer. They must scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit their quota. The company knows immediately when they fall behind. Fail to meet the quota and you are fired."

"But the rise of capitalism also depended on something else. It needed labour. Lots of it, and cheap. solved this problem too. With subsistence economies destroyed and commons fenced off, people had no choice but to sell their labour for wages - not to earn a bit of extra income, as under the previous regime, nor to satisfy the demands of a lord, as under serfdom, but simply in order to survive. They became, in a word, proletarians."

"Confronting this crisis ultimately means confronting capitalism, and that means directly resisting these layoffs, since layoffs are always the first weapon used against working people in moments of . es and corporations that have benefited from years of economic growth (not to mention the massive of workers’ labor) owe employees and their families a huge debt and it’s time to pay up. In order to make this happen, working people must organize for and demand: 1. An immediate ban on all layoffs. 2. Full wages for all employees, whether they are working during the crisis or not. And 3. A redistribution of working hours among currently unemployed workers (including undocumented and s) so that no one is denied the essential right to employment."

"When times are good, capital can extract huge profits from labor with little risk. For instance, after the last economic crisis, the (thanks in large part to government bailouts) not only managed to recover all of its losses by 2013, it then proceeded to almost double its value in the seven years that followed — an average rate of growth equal to about 14 percent per year. By contrast, average hourly wages for working people, which rose less than three percent per year for most of that same period, recovered much more slowly, and many workers actually saw their wages fall or remain flat when adjusted for inflation. When times are bad, however, in moments of crisis, when profits are low, or when there is little or no demand — such as we are seeing in many industries today — corporations and companies can protect themselves and their by simply letting workers go. Workers, on the other hand usually must continue to pay for food, rent, healthcare, and basic utilities in order to survive. As a consequence, while capital can often weather the storm of such economic crises, they can severely weaken the power of the working class by creating what Marx called a vast . And since unemployment insurance compensations are rarely available to all and always only for a short period of time, workers — whether laid off or only threatened with the prospect of layoffs—will eventually be pressured to work much harder for less wages. And this is precisely why the future of worker’s power depends on how we respond to this crisis now."

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth."

"Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism."

"Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V. And you think you're so clever and classless and free. But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

"The academy now boasts specialists by thousands in Asian studies, GLT studies, Latino/a studies, Native American studies, and multicultural studies, but barely a handful in proletarian studies. It still hasn't found a way to become serious about class."

"The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognises alienation as its own instrument and in it it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence."

"Most people have no alternative but to sell their ability to work for a wage and inevitably be paid less than the value they produce. This is the capital order, the backbone of our society that we do not criticize or even discuss. It is only through the lens of class that we can escape this trap and understand the functioning of our economic system and the policies implemented to govern it."

"If people no longer accept their condition as low-paid wage laborers without secure employment, our economic system collapses."

"Marxism is the capitalism of the working class."

"For most workers the transition to socialism held out considerably fewer rewards. Though everyone appreciated job security and a steady income—especially those who had experienced the 1930s—living conditions were still poor and the shortages of consumer goods and sometimes even food clashed with socialist ideals of plenty. Even worse was the lack of working-class autonomy. All over eastern Europe workers had tasted influence and power of their own in the immediate postwar years. In some areas factory councils had taken over the running of plants or negotiated deals with the owners. By the late 1940s Communist trade unions came in and took over workers’ organizations, and officials appointed by the authorities were the new bosses. They set production quotas after instructions from above, and workers had little influence on their daily existence. Workers protested everywhere, with some condemning the Communists as Nazis in disguise. Gradually, in the post-Stalin era the authorities tried to buy off workers’ protests through accepting lower levels of productivity and increasing subsidies on food and rent."

"A based economy—where workers democratically run enterprises, deciding what, how and where to produce, and what to do with any profits—could, and likely would, put social needs and goals (like proper preparation for pandemics) ahead of profits. Workers are the majority in all capitalist societies; their interests are those of the majority. Employers are always a small minority; theirs are the "special interests" of that minority. Capitalism gives that minority the position, profits and power to determine how the society as a whole lives or dies. That's why all employees now wonder and worry about how long our jobs, incomes, homes and bank accounts will last—if we still have them. A minority (employers) decides all those questions and excludes the majority (employees) from making those decisions, even though that majority must live with their results."

"I am not against migration. It is simply pragmatic to restrict migration, while at the same time encouraging integration and fighting discrimination. I support the idea of the free movement of goods, people, money and jobs in Europe."

"In the sensorimotor area on top of the cortex there are four maps of a little upside down person, distorted I shape with every bit of skin and muscle represented in detail. This upside map is called the sensorimotor homunculus, the little human. The nervous system abounds in such maps, some of which appear to serve as 'self systems', organizing and integrating vast amounts of local bits of information."

"If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it."

"...worldview, a new paradigm of perception and explanation, which is manifested in integration, holistic thinking, purpose-seeking, mutual causality, and process-focused inquiry"

"The aims of General Systems Theory: a) There is a general tendency towards integration in the various sciences: natural and social. b) Such integration seems to be centered in a general theory of systems. c) Such theory may be an important means for aiming at exact theory in the non-physical fields of science.(1956, d) Developing unifying principles running “vertically” through the universes of the individual sciences, this theory brings us nearer to the goal of unity of science."

"But no one expected he had ever get very far, because I don’t suppose he could even integrate e to the x. Is such ignorance possible gasped someone?"

"The formation of the differential equations proper to the phenomena is, independent of their integration, a very important acquisition, on account of the approximations which mathematical analysis allows between questions, otherwise heterogeneous."

"Mathematical analysis branch of mathematics that includes the theories of differentiation, integration, measure, limits, infinite series, and analytic functions. These theories areoften studied in the context of real numbers, complex numbers, and real and complex numbers and functions. Analysis evolved from calculus, which involves the elementary concepts and technique of analysis."

"Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources"

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."

"There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their land-deeds give them no title."

"In order to consolidate the euro we need to harmonise our economic, fiscal and social policies, hence we are going toward greater integration.We are going to put in place an economic system of governance of the Eurozone. Great Britain is not part of Eurozone; t at the same time the decisions we will take will have great importance to Britain"

"By partnering with Apple, we have the opportunity to add value by integrating the world’s best digital music [iPod music player and iTunes music] offering into HP’s larger digital entertainment"

"He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration."

"Some people pursue wholeness and integration; others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach. Then too, the prophetic aspect of the arts is reflected"

"The Internet is ultimately about innovation and integration, but you don't get the innovation unless you integrate Web technology into the processes by which you run your business."

"Secular humanism contrasts with religious humanism, which is an integration of humanist ethical philosophy with religious rituals and beliefs that center on human needs, interests, and abilities."

"...to 'integrate the study of international economics with the study of international politics to deepen our comprehension of the forces at work in the world."

"Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world."

"An effective information infrastructure must build on enabling technologies to create an integrated and adaptive system that is accessible to all potential users."

"Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane."

"From a fundamental point of view, integration is less demanding than differentiation, as far as the conditions imposed on the class of functions. As a consequence, numerical integration is a lot easier to carry out than numerical differentiation."

"There are a number of standard procedures which can enable a large number of common integrals to be evaluated explicitly. The simplest strategy is integration by substitution which means changing the variable of integration."

"Integration is the annual technocultural fest of Indian Statistical Institute, usually held during the first and second weekend of January each year. It is one of the biggest fests in Kolkata, and attracts participation from all over the world. Integration is relatively a new addition to the set of Calcutta fests, and yet, it has carved out a niche for itself."

"Integrated circuit (IC) is a circuit in which all or some of the circuit elements are inseparably associated and electrically interconnected so that it is considered to be indivisible for the purposes of construction and commerce."

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular."

"Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love."

"The most highly satisfactory use of the reverse-curve sign of integration used in calculus is for those two S-openings in the top of a violin"

"Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. ... What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"

"An integrated Approach is a holistic christological approach to exploring and reconsidering the gifts and graces of God for healing the various aspects of human person.An integrated approach will include a biblically based analysis and synthesis of historical Christian traditions pertaining to healing and deliverance as they relate to the practice of counseling."

"We're moving to this integration of biomedicine, information technology, wireless and mobile now - an era of digital medicine. Even my stethoscope is now digital. And of course, there's an app for that."

"The integration of exponentially growing technologies is beginning to empower the patient, enable the doctor, enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick."

"People who allow others not of their race to live among them will perish, because the inevitable result of a racial integration is racial inter-breeding which destroys the characteristics and existence of a race. Forced integration is deliberate and malicious genocide, particularly for a people like the White Race who are now a small minority in the world."

"I see with much pleasure that you are working on a large work on the integral Calculus [ … ] The reconciliation of the methods which you are planning to make, serves to clarify them mutually, and what they have in common contains very often their true metaphysics; this is why that metaphysics is almost the last thing that one discovers. The spirit arrives at the results as if by instinct; it is only on reflecting upon the route that it and others have followed that it succeeds in generalising the methods and in discovering its metaphysics."

"Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration."

"The key distinctive of a truly Christian education is the effective practice of worldview integration that is, an approach to biblical integration that leads to a Christian worldview.”"

"Overcoming the Cold War required courage from the people of Central and Eastern Europe and what was then the German Democratic Republic, but it also required the steadfastness of Western partner over many decades when many had long lost hope of integration of the two Germanys and Europe."

"In a life-long partnership with his wife Jessie, James Grier Miller contributed substantially to the development of behavioural science and to the integration of disciplines through general systems theory, remaining actively engaged in these areas throughout his working life."

"In particular to perform integration — you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on"

"Common integration is only the memory of differentiation... The artifices by which it [integration] is effected, are changes, not from the unknown to the known, but from the forms in which memory will not serve to those in which it will"

"[Malcolm X] in keeping with the Nation's teachings he espoused black supremacy, advocated the separation of black and white Americans and scoffed at the civil rights movement's emphasis on integration."

"The Generic Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology is about those methods, models and tools which are needed to build the integrated enterprise. The architecture is generic because it applies to most, potentially all types of enterprise."

"If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.”"

"...way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all"

"Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other—only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly."

"The powers which tend to preserve, and those which tend to change the condition of the earth's surface, are never in equilibrio; the latter are, in all cases, the most powerful, and, in respect of the former, are like living in comparison of dead forces. Hence the law of decay is one which suffers no exception: The elements of all bodies were once loose and unconnected, and to the same state nature has appointed that they should all return... TIME performs the office of integrating the infinitesimal parts of which this progression is made up; it collects them into one sum, and produces from them an amount greater than any that can be assigned."

"Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way … Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science."

"The success and originality of American integration stem precisely from the fact that immigrants' descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as Americans in the fullest sense, sharing basic ideals across racial and ethnic barriers. In France, the characteristic attitude of newcomers from North Africa, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly one of alienation, confrontation, rejection, and hatred."

"It's in the black players and it remains there. The National League was the first to sign black players and remained ahead all these years. And so many outstanding players are black that it's hard to have an outstanding team without your share of black players. It seemed like the National League teams were willing to sign any promising prospect regardless of color, while the American League was only interested in the outstanding, can't-miss black prospect. And if you don't sign the raw talent that needs a few years to develop, you lose out on some outstanding players."

"There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity."

"This integrative action in virtue of which the nervous system unifies from separate organs an animal possessing solidarity, an individual, is the problem before us."

"It may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child."

"The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter."

"A true balance between work and life comes with knowing that your life activities are integrated, not separated."

"Globalization (or Globalisation) is the increasing interdependence, integration and interaction among people and corporations in disparate locations around."

"The emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions. Here we review the mechanisms of large-scale integration that counterbalance the distributed anatomical and functional organization of brain activity to enable the emergence of coherent behaviour and cognition."

"Let us therefore see their actual conception, in thought and action, and see how many perspectives it actually takes into account and how many perspectives it attempts to integrate, and thus let us see how deep and how wide runs that bodhisattva vow to refuse rest until all perspectives whatsoever are liberated into their primordial nature."

"It is vision-logic with its centauric/planetary worldview that, in my opinion, holds the only hope for the integration of the biosphere and noosphere, the supranational organization of planetary consciousness, the genuine recognition of ecological balance…"

"It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.”"

"I believe in recognising every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being."

"We who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad feel that when you try and pass integration laws here in America, forcing white people to pretend that they are accepting black people, what you are doing is making white people act in a hypocritical way."

"Of psychics were truly successful and if their results were not simply the consequence of trickery at worse or good interviewing skills (at best), then why don't law enforcement agencies have psychic detective squads, a real X-Files Unit, or other ways to integrate these paranormal investigative capabilities."

"Most miscarriages (about 60%) occur randomly when an embryo receives an abnormal number of chromosomes during fertilization. This type of genetic problem happens by chance; there is no medical condition that causes it. However, it becomes more common in women of increased reproductive age. Are there other genetic problems associated with repeated miscarriages? In a small number of couples who have repeated miscarriages, one partner has a chromosome in which a piece is transferred to another chromosome. This is called a translocation. People who have a translocation usually do not have any physical signs or symptoms, but some of their eggs or sperm will have abnormal chromosomes. If an embryo gets too much or too little genetic material, it often leads to a miscarriage."

"Early miscarriages usually happen because the embryo is not developing as it should. Chromosome problems are thought to be the most common cause. These problems usually happen for no reason and are unlikely to happen again. To develop properly, a baby needs the right number of normal chromosomes. He’ll need 23 from his mum and 23 from his dad. Chromosomal abnormalities can prevent a baby from developing. These abnormalities may happen because there are too many chromosomes or not enough chromosomes, or because there are changes to a chromosome’s structure. In that case, the pregnancy will come to an end at the embryo stage. It’s thought that up to 95 per cent of pregnancies with chromosomal abnormalities end in miscarriage."

"It is agreed that most, if not all, new mutations are deleterious. In plants, much fewer than 1% of radiation-induced mutants are found to be useful. In insects, a few induced mutations confer some advantage, but only to completely inbred populations - a situation quite in contrast with the human condition (NEWCOMBE 1960). According to DOBZHANSKY (1957) : ‘if anything, radiation-induced mutants are more destructive than the spontaneous ones. As far as genetic effects are concerned, the only safe dose of high-energy radiation is no radiation’. As observed in mammals, mostly the mouse, the effects of radiation-induced mutations may be : (1) Dominant: lethals, seen as reduced litter size, or non-lethals, evidenced as offspring which are malformed or diminished in vitality or life-span; semi-sterility, resulting from translocation, is seen one generation later as a reduction of litters by one-half and is handed down to subsequent generations (PAULA HERTWIG 1940). (2) Recessive mutations are demonstrated by mating the offspring of exposed males to females known to be (heterozygous) carriers of certain traits (W. L. RUSSELL 1954; CARTER et coll. 1956). (3) Mutations involving sex-chromosomes may be reflected by a change in the sex ratio of the offspring (sex-linked lethals, see Fig. 1)"

"In point of fact, as MULLER (1955) notes, the less harmful a mutant, the greater the number of individuals it affects, inasmuch as reproduction remains possible. Thus the total measure of mutational harm is the number of mutations produced, of whatever degree of harmfulness, rather than the damage to any one individual or generation. In a population which, like the human, is not inbred, the generation showing the greatest effect of a mutation should be the first filial one; but the total effect in the posterity, over an indefinite number of generations, is still greater (CROW 1958). This point shall be illustrated in relation to the foreseeable effects of radiation upon descendants of man (see Part 11)."

"There are a number of studies that show radiation can cause heritable mutations in the offspring of irradiated organisms. These “germ-line mutations” have been shown to occur in unique sequences of DNA called “minisatellite loci”. The high frequencies of spontaneous and induced mutations at minisatellite loci allow mutation induction to be measured at low doses of exposure in a small population, making minisatellite mutation a powerful tool to investigate radiation-induced heritable mutations. However, the biological significance of these mutations is uncertain, and their relationship to health risk or population fitness is unknown. We have adopted this mutation assay to study the role of adaptive response in protecting mice against radiation-induced heritable defects. We have shown that male mice, adapted to radiation with a low dose priming exposure, do not pass on mutations to their offspring caused by a subsequent large radiation exposure to the adapted males."

"Lola the six-clawed lobster has escaped the fate that would face most of her kind, thanks to her genetic mutation, and will be served up in an exhibit case at the Maine Maine State Aquarium rather than on a dinner table."

"Two assumptions are commonly made in the estimation of genetic risk: (1) that the seven specific loci in the mouse constitute a suitable basis for extrapolation to genetic disease in humans, and (2) that mutations are induced by radiation damage (energy-loss events leading to double-stranded damage) occurring within the gene and are induced linearly with dose, at least at low doses. Recent evidence on the mutability of repeat sequences is reviewed that suggests that neither of these assumptions is as well founded as we like to think."

"Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy."

"When the frequency of a gene in the general population exceeds 1%, is not considered a random mutation but a mutation that has been positively selected during evolution."

"It is possible that the presence of altered gene combinations, as in ADHD, can bring concrete benefits to society but are detrimental to the individual."

"Charles Xavier's dream — where all Earth's children, mutant or otherwise, live together in peace and harmony! Where people are judged for who they are — not what they look like or how they're born. That's why he created the X-men, to exemplify that dream."

"Mutants; the Children of the Atom. Men and women granted power beyond measure. Mankind not understanding these gifts of evolution have chosen to meet them with persecution and death. There are those mutants that agree with the humans that this world is too small for both species and that one shall by necessity forever stricken from the face of the Earth. I believe in an alternative. A world wherein man and mutant coexist in peace. They’re providing a much needed balance to an all too fragile world. To that end, I have assembled those men and women willing to fight for that peace. To defend the world that fear is optional. To that end, I, Professor Charles Xavier, have assembled the X-Men."

"Mutants are all around us. They could be your neighbors. They could be your co-workers. They could be related to you. Gifted with extraordinary powers, they are the next step on the evolutionary ladder. Some use their powers for good; some, for unspeakable evil. One group had dedicated its wondrous abilities to protect mankind, even those who hate and fear them. Known to the world at large as outlaws, they are the X-Men."

"Unique events are unrepeatable and cannot be subjected to any sort of experimental investigation. … His general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin’s time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe."

"Here I am saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr. deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us. Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn't seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as where we would wind up going. It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren't."

"We were always afraid a mutant with superior intellectual powers would come along," Baines said reflectively. "A deeve who would be to us what we are to the great apes. Something with a bulging cranium, telepathic ability, a perfect semantic system, ultimate powers of symbolization and calculation. A development along our own path. A better human being." "He acts by reflex," Anita said wonderingly. She had the analysis and was sitting at one of the desks studying it intently. "Reflex — like a lion. A golden lion." She pushed the tape aside, a strange expression on her face. "The lion god." "Beast," Wisdom corrected tartly. "Blond beast, you mean." "He runs fast," Baines said, "and that's all. No tools. He doesn't build anything or utilize anything outside himself. He just stands and waits for the right opportunity and then he runs like hell." "This is worse than anything we've anticipated," Wisdom said. His beefy face was lead-gray. He sagged like an old man, his blunt hands trembling and uncertain. "To be replaced by an animal! Something that runs and hides. Something without a language!" He spat savagely. "That's why they weren't able to communicate with it. We wondered what kind of semantic system it had. It hasn't got any! No more ability to talk and think than a — dog."

"According to Goldschmidt, all that evolution by the usual mutations—dubbed "micromutations"—can accomplish is to bring about "diversification strictly within species, usually, if not exclusively, for the sake of adaptation of the species to specific conditions within the area which it is able to occupy." New species, genera, and higher groups arise at once, by cataclysmic saltations—termed macromutations or systematic mutations—which bring about in one step a basic reconstruction of the whole organism. The role of natural selection in this process becomes "reduced to the simple alternative: immediate acceptance or rejection." A new form of life having been thus catapulted into being, the details of its structures and functions are subsequently adjusted by micromutation and selection. It is unnecessary to stress here that this theory virtually rejects evolution as this term is usually understood (to evolve means to unfold or to develop gradually), and that the systematic mutations it postulates have never been observed. It is possible to imagine a mutation so drastic that its product becomes a monster hurling itself beyond the confines of species, genus, family, or class. But in what Goldschmidt has called the "hopeful monster" the harmonious system, which any organism must necessarily possess, must be transformed at once into a radically different, but still sufficiently coherent, system to enable the monster to survive. The assumption that such a prodigy may, however rarely, walk the earth overtaxes one's credulity, even though it may be right that the existence of life in the cosmos is in itself an extremely improbable event."

"Mutants. Since the discovery of their existence they have been regarded with fear, suspicion, often hatred. Across the planet, debate rages. Are mutants the next link in the evolutionary chain or simply a new species of humanity fighting for their share of the world? Either way it is a historical fact: Sharing the world has never been humanity's defining attribute."

"For randomized controlled trials of treatments, it is essential to have a clear classification of pregnancy loss type for both fetal and very early loss events. In addition, there is a strong argument for mandatory karyotyping of all pregnancy losses to exclude a lethal trisomy karyotype or triploidy. This is because, irrespective of treatment intervention, pregnancy loss has occurred and may have been described as a ‘false’ treatment failure. Recent papers testify to the high rate of abnormal chromosome type when pregnancy loss has occurred (Bricker and Farquharson, 2002; Levine et al., 2002; Stephenson et al., 2002; Philip et al., 2003; Morikawa et al., 2004)."

"The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants."

"The most common cause of miscarriage is chromosomal/genetic abnormalities, leading to ~50% of spontaneous miscarriages. Genetic abnormalities most frequently occur due to aneuploidy—when the chromosomes fail to separate properly during cell division—meaning that some cells have extra copies of a particular chromosome while others have none. The exact causes of aneuploidy are not well understood, although increased maternal age (>35 yrs) is the greatest risk factor."

"Numerous authors have looked at the role of chromosomal abnormalities in these embryonic losses. One study looked at 144 spontaneous miscarriages by obtaining direct preperations of chorionic villi. Seventy per cent had abnormal chromosomes of which 64% were autosomal trisomies, 9% polyploidy, 7% monosomy X ad 6% structural rearrangements. Errors of gonadogenesis during meiosis will result in autosomal trisomies. Errors of fertilization can result in triploidy from dispermy. Errors of the first division of the zygote result result in tetraploidy or mosaicism. None of these would be expected to be a repetitive event except in the very rare instances of balances translocations or inversions in one parent"

"We applaud the burgeoning emphasis on change in regulatory genes as the stuff of morphological evolution... if only because one of us had written a book to argue that the classical, and widely ignored data on evolution by heterochrony should be exhumed and valued as a primary demonstration of regulatory change. We do not see how point mutations in structural genes can lead, even by gradual accumulations, to new morphological designs. Regulatory changes in the timing of complex ontogenetic programs seem far more promising—and potentially rapid, in conformity with our punctuational predilections. The near identity of humans and chimps for structural genes, and the evidence of major regulatory change indicated by human neoteny provides an important confirmation."

"Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It is how we have evolved from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward."

"Anything can happen. How absolutely true. You're exactly the mutant I'm looking for! You're hired."

"Aside from inheriting half of the genome of each of our parents, we are born with a small number of novel mutations that occurred during gametogenesis and postzygotically. Recent genome and exome sequencing studies of parent–offspring trios have provided the first insights into the number and distribution of these de novo mutations in health and disease, pointing to risk factors that increase their number in the offspring. De novo mutations have been shown to be a major cause of severe early-onset genetic disorders such as intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, and other developmental diseases. In fact, the occurrence of novel mutations in each generation explains why these reproductively lethal disorders continue to occur in our population. Recent studies have also shown that de novo mutations are predominantly of paternal origin and that their number increases with advanced paternal age."

"The prevalence of chromosome abnormalities in women facing a single sporadic miscarriage is to be 45%. Approximately 50% to 60% of early spontaneous miscarriages are associated with a chromosomal anomaly of conceptus. Most common abnormality is aneuploidy, with autosomal trisomy accounting for more than 50% of chromosomally abnormal abortuses. A strong family history of recurrent miscarriage or genetic anomaly suggests a parental karyotypic abnormality, and a chromosomal analysis of the affected partner is appropriate in the primary evaluation. Chromosomal analysis of the miscarriage offers an explanation in at least 50% of cases. Parental karyotyping is not predictive of a subsequent miscarriage. Routine karyotyping of couples with recurrent miscarriage is not recommended. Cytogenetic analysis may be performed on products of conception to avoid unnecessary evaluation and treatment and because an aneuploid conceptus indicates a somewhat greater likelihood of success with a subsequent pregnancy (Evidence Level III)."

"What would you do with mutants who were just plain boys and girls and certainly not dangerous? You school them. You develop their skills. So I gave them a teacher, Professor X. Of course, it was the natural thing to do, instead of disorienting or alienating people who were different from us, I made the X-Men part of the human race, which they were. Possibly, radiation, if it is beneficial, may create mutants that’ll save us instead of doing us harm. I felt that if we train the mutants our way, they’ll help us - and not only help us, but achieve a measure of growth in their own sense. And so, we could all live together."

"This was a period when we were experimenting with the atom bomb. People were wondering what the effects would be. Everybody worried ‘Would we all become mutants? We played around with this ‘mutation thing’ and I came up with the X-Men, who were associated with radiation and its effects on humanity."

"Mutants and humans. They have long struggled to coexist. While some try to unite the world, others try to dominate it. Neither strategy has prevailed. But when conflicts reach an impasse, inevitably something happens to shift the balance forever."

"When an individual acquires great power, the use or misuse of that power is everything. Will it be used for the greater good or will it be used for personal or destructive ends? Now this is a question we must all ask ourselves. Why? Because we are mutants."

"They wish to "cure" us. But I say to you we are the cure! The cure for that infirm, imperfect condition called "Homo sapiens!" They have their weapons... We have ours. We will strike with a vengeance and a fury that this world has never witnessed!"

"It was things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he thought, that made you believe the world was maybe just as well off destroyed."

"I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants … Fear implies respect."

"It is a generally accepted assumption that sporadic pregnancy losses occurring before an embryo has developed represent a ‘physiological’ phenomenon, which prevents conceptions affected by serious structural malformations or chromosomal aberrations incompatible with life from progressing to viability. This concept is supported by clinical studies in which embryoscopy was used to assess fetal morphology prior to removal by uterine evacuation. Fetal malformations were observed in 85% of cases presenting with early clinical miscarriage. The same study also demonstrated that 75% of the fetuses had an abnormal karyotype. Fetal chromosomal aneuploidies arising from non-inherited and non-disjunctional events are common. Indeed, in a recent study using comparative genomic hybridization to study the chromosomal complement of all blastomeres in preimplantation human embryos, more than 90% were found to have at least one chromosomal abnormality in one or more cells. The clinical implications of minor, mosaic and possibly ‘transient’ aneuploidies remain unclear. However, while most fetuses with severe developmental defects will die in utero some aneuploidies can be compatible with survival to term. The most commonly encountered is trisomy 21, although 80% of affected embryos perish in utero or in the neonatal period. In most cases, the extra chromosome is of maternal origin and caused by a malsegregation event in the first meiotic division. The risk of this increases with maternal age and may be considered to be a biological rather than pathological phenomenon. Although fetal chromosomal aberrations may be identified in 29% to 60% of cases in women with RM, the incidence decreases as the number of miscarriages increases suggesting other mechanisms as a cause of the miscarriage in RM couples with multiple losses."

"I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen."

"The X-Men, created by Jewish American comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, is a team of mutants, a class of human being first introduced as people that “possess an extrapower…one which ordinary humans do not!!” (EUX1 #1: 8ii). Especially after the introduction of the mutant-hunting robot Sentinels in X-Men #14 (Nov. 1965, EUX1), Marvel Comics’ mutants have been increasingly inscribed with allegorical Otherness. They have been subject to many of the prejudices that have historically plagued marginalized minorities, including, among other things, forced and voluntary segregation, slurs, persecution, and genocidal campaigns, and, conspiracy theories about their aims as a group."

"Most miscarriages occur because the fetus isn't developing as expected. About 50 percent of miscarriages are associated with extra or missing chromosomes. Most often, chromosome problems result from errors that occur by chance as the embryo divides and grows — not problems inherited from the parents."

"It's 1987, do you know what your children are? Paid for by citizens in support of the Mutant Registration Act."

"Sometimes something can go wrong at the point of conception and the foetus receives too many or not enough chromosomes. The reasons for this are often unclear, but it means the foetus will not be able to develop normally, resulting in a miscarriage. This is very unlikely to recur. It does not necessarily mean there's any problem with you or your partner."

"The most common cause of pregnancy loss is a problem with the chromosomes that would make it impossible for the fetus to develop normally."

"We conclude — unexpectedly — that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak, and there is no doubt that mutations of large effect are sometimes important in adaptation. We hasten to add, however, that we are not "macromutationists" who believe that adaptations are nearly always based on major genes. The neo-Darwinian view could well be correct. … We hope to encourage evolutionists to reexamine this neglected question and to provide evidence to settle it."

"But, be that as it may, is this variation, or variations, beneficial to humanity in their environment? According to Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg, the X-men do have “helpful mutations..." This point is demonstrated numerous times in the adventures of the X-Men, where team members use their mutant powers to help them survive dangerous situations where normal humans would be killed instantly” (Gresh and Weinberg 2002, 135). What Gresh and Weinberg have overlooked, however, is that these “dangerous situations” came after the genetic variation, not before. Most of the battles the X-Men fight are either against other mutants-- such as Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who have a more violent response to human oppression of mutants-- or against anti-mutant hate groups, such as the Sentinels or Friends of Humanity, whose only goal is to wipe out all mutants. All of these “dangerous situations” come up in response to the X-Men’s genetic variation, meaning that this variation cannot be an adaptive response to an environment. Of course, under the theory of evolution by natural selection, every mutation need not necessarily be useful."

"Family entertainment? Bollocks. What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats. Where's the fun in pictures? Oh, well, there we are. Here's the theme music. Goodnight."

"One way to further improve the estimate of the abortion rate is to account for at least some of the occult abortions that are not detected by high-sensitivity comes from studies comparing aneuploidy in very young embryos (cleavage stage and blastocysts) to conceptuses that spontaneously aborted after a pregnancy had been clinically detected. At the early embryo stages, monosomy (missing one homolog from one or more of the 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes) and trisomies (a extra chromosome at one or more of the 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes) were found to be equally common. But among conceptuses that survive to clinical detection, and then abort, essentially no autosomal monosomies were observed (<<1%). This repeated finding demonstrates that all autosomal monosomic conceptuses spontaneously abort before a pregnancy can be detected by elevated levels of hCG, i.e., prior to implantation. As a consequence, for every observed aborted conceptus that carried one or more trisomies after clinical detection, there must have been one occult aborted conceptus due to one or more monosomies. At least 50% of aborted fetuses are karyotypically abnormal and at least 60% of these carry one or more trisomies. There are therefore at least 0.5*0.6* = 0.3 occult abortions due to monosomy for every detected post-implantation abortion. In Fig. 3, I have added these additional occult abortions to the total."

"6.2 Genetic factors The finding of an abnormal parental karyotype should prompt referral to a clinical geneticist. Genetic counselling offers the couple a prognosis for the risk of future pregnancies with an unbalanced chromosome complement and the opportunity for familial chromosome studies. Reproductive options in couples with chromosomal rearrangements include proceeding to a further natural pregnancy with or without a prenatal diagnosis test, gamete donation and adoption. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis has been proposed as a treatment option for translocation carriers. Since preimplantation genetic diagnosis necessitates that the couple undergo in vitro fertilisation to produce embryos, couples with proven fertility need to be aware of the financial cost as well as implantation and live birth rates per cycle following in vitro fertilisation/preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Furthermore, they should be informed that they have a higher (50–70%) chance of a healthy live birth in future untreated pregnancies following natural conception than is currently achieved after preimplantation genetic diagnosis/in vitro fertilisation (approximately 30%). Preimplantation genetic screening with in vitro fertilisation treatment in women with unexplained recurrent miscarriage does not improve live birth rates. Preimplantation genetic screening in conjunction with in vitro fertilisation has been advocated as a treatment option for women with recurrent miscarriage, the rationale being that the identification and transfer of what are thought to be genetically normal embryos will lead to a live birth. The live birth rate of women with unexplained recurrent miscarriage who conceive naturally is significantly higher than currently achieved after preimplantation genetic screening/in vitro fertilisation (20–30%)."

"I'm telling you, with everything we know, about science, about the makeup of the human body, what happened in that classroom is impossible. That kid attracted an arc of electricity from thirty feet away, and not just from the Jacob's Ladder, I mean, after a second it was like it was coming out of the whole… building."

"We're stumbling around in a very dark age basically trying not to kill each other. So it hurts me when you say "So what?" Because you are not just different, Jeremy, I think you have a mind that we won't evolve to for like thousands of years — you're maybe the man of the future right here and now."

"People love a nice shot of an orange sunrise over the islands in Casco Bay, of waves crashing on the rocks in front of Portland Head Light, or of seagulls fighting over rotten bait. But the time tested crowd favorite is a picture of a mutant lobster. They’re actually a lot more common than one might think, sometimes they come up with multiple claws, sometimes they’re different colors, and sometimes they’re so riddled with shell disease that they’re almost unrecognizable."

"We hypothesize that the increased risk of spontaneous abortion with male age is a consequence of an increasing frequency of chromosomal anomalies in the spermatozoa with male age, which in turn increases the risk of spontaneous abortion. The influence of male age on the proportion of spermatozoa carrying a chromosomal anomaly or with damaged DNA has been documented in several groups of men. It may well result, in part, from the continuous replication of stem cell chromosomes from puberty onward; indeed, male stem cells have undergone about 150 chromosomal replications at the age of 20 years and about 600 by the age of 40 years. The chromosomal anomalies found in spontaneous abortions include autosomal trisomies, present in about 50 percent of abortuses with chromosomal anomalies, monosomy X (present in about 20 percent), and triploidy (16 percent). The remaining 12 percent correspond mainly to tetraploidy and structural anomalies of the chromosomes. The two most frequent anomalies sometimes have a paternal origin: Autosomal trisomies stem from nondisjunction during spermatogenesis in 10–20 percent or more of cases and, in monosomy X, the missing chromosome is most often the paternal one. Moreover, sperm chromosome aneuploidy may play a role in the etiology of recurrent pregnancy loss."

"There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains."

"The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants. And they hated the mutants. Of course, they hated them. They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people."

"Genetic bases of defective chromosome content or structure In a biological sense, genetic defects leading to abortion may originate from two partners: The conceptus and the uterus. From the conceptus side, it is well established that chromosomal anomalies lead to implantation defects. However, they occur mostly stochastically; to be the genetic cause of a recurrent loss, a genetic defect leading to systematic chromosome anomalies has to be found, as nicely reviewed recently by Kurahashi and coworkers. Abnormal chromosome structure may originate from defects in the checkpoint mechanisms that constitute a quality control factory of the cell, which is able to detect meiosis anomalies and is called Spindle Assembly Checkpoint (SAC), constituted by pro teins such as Mad1, Mad2, Bub1, Bub3, BubR1, and Mps1. A very recent study addressed this question on the general issue of defective reproduction performance, by screening two candidate genes, aurora kinase B (AURKB) and synaptonemal complex protein 3 (SYCP3). In the AURKB gene, the authors identified low frequency (0.5%) non synonymous variants (c. 155C.T, c. 236T.C, and c. 880G.A) inducing the changes p.A52V, p.I79T, and p.A294T in the polypeptidic chain, respectively. 236T >C and 880G >A were associated with antecedents of pregnancy losses. This preliminary study is one of those that pave the way toward evaluating genes playing a role in the quality of the meiotic progression. Two other genes have been investigated to this respect in miscarriage, BUB1 and MAD2. The authors showed firstly that as generally assumed, half the embryos from spontaneous miscarriages have an abnormal karyotype. By western blotting, the authors quantified the two proteins and estimated that they were under expressed in pathological cases. The authors also isolated chorionic villi where they targeted BUB1 and MAD2 expression by short hairpin RNA (shRNA) and showed that this induces an abnormal karyotype at a ~ sixfold increased frequency, compared to controls (indicating that mitotic defects can also be induced when these genes are dysfunctional). The role of MAD2 in such defects was independently confirmed by another study on trisomic abortuses. Clearly, therefore, anomalies in spindle assembly can lead to aneuploidies, and infertilities in the most severe cases, such as in the case of the recently identified mutation of the cohesin STAG3, leading to premature ovarian failure, but less severe mutations in the SAC genes could lead to variants that have more subtle effects. There is clearly space for studying this aspect of spindle stability on a wider basis than what has been performed up to now in the context of recurrent miscarriage."

"Robert Anton Wilson is the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics, and commentary. … Wilson is a primary source for the ironic style of conspiracism, a sensibility that treats alleged cabals not as intrigues to be exposed or lies to be debunked but as a bizarre mutant mythos to be mined for laughs, metaphors, and social insights."

"Of all creatures, only the Binder had bested the Lord of Hellwell. Then the gods had come to challenge his power. They had been puny in the early days, struggling to discipline their mutant powers with drugs, hypnosis, meditation, neurosurgery — forging them into Attributes — and across the ages, those powers had grown. Four of them had entered Hellwell, only four, and his legions had not been able to repel them."

"The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics."

"Neutrality is too often assumed to require the bleaching out of all traces of faith, excluding religious belief and discourse from public life. But it doesn't, and we can see why by appeal to the notion of public reason, articulated most clearly by the late political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls was quite clear that the religious have no obligation at all to keep their faith entirely to themselves. "Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time," he wrote, "provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support.""

"Science values objectivity, rationality, and neutrality. It has concern for the truth. The humanities value subjectivity, imagination, and commitment. They have a concern for justice. Design values practicality, ingenuity, creativity, and empathy. It has concerns for goodness of fit and for the impact of design on future generations."

"A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it."

"Hayek forced into public discourse the question of the compatibility of democracy and statism. And unlike Burnham, he made no pretense of neutrality about the phenomena he described. … In responding to Burnham and Hayek … liberals were in fact responding to a powerful strain of Jeffersonian anti-statism in American political culture … The result was a subtle but important shift in liberal thinking."

"Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them."

"While we enforced the neutrality which we prepared to observe, we declared at the same time that that neutrality must cease if British interests were assailed or menaced. Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own, have denounced this policy as a selfish policy. My Lord Mayor, it is as selfish as patriotism."

"Perhaps what I am about to say may seem strange to you, who are socialists, and vaunt humanity and your duty to your neighbor, but I never seek to protect a society which does not protect me, and which I will even say, generally occupies itself about me only to injure me; and thus by giving them a low place in my esteem, and preserving a neutrality towards them, it is society and my neighbor who are indebted to me."

"My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other."

"The rights of neutrality will only be respected, when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral."

"It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological — and sometimes military — pressure to fall into line."

"Doing nothing is not the absence of a policy; it is, in fact, the adoption of one. "Neutrality" favors the side with the biggest arsenal. "Nonintervention" is a form of interference."

"In order to get the proper perspective, we must take a quick glance at the past. Seven years ago, Western Europe faced the threat of imminent aggression by Soviet forces of overwhelming strength. In that hour of mortal danger the North Atlantic Treaty was signed. The decision to accede to the Alliance required great vision and great courage on the part of many of the members. For the United States, it meant abandoning their traditional policy of isolationism from the affairs of Europe. For Norway and others it meant abandoning their tradition of neutrality. The free world owes a deep depth of gratitude to the Statesmen of the Western Democracies in these days. Their vision has reaped a rich reward for us all. The Alliance which they brought into being saved the free world from the unfathomable disaster which threatened it. Peace in Europe has been preserved. Soviet westward expansion has been halted. A shield of armed forces has been built up which, though not yet strong enough to resist an all out attack, is at least a significant deterrent to aggression. The forces of NATO are no longer a dream, they are a reality."

"Donald Judd spoke of a "neutral" surface, but what is meant? Neutrality must involve some relationship (to other ways of painting, thinking?) He would have to include these in his work to establish the neutrality of that surface. He also used "non" or "not" – expressive – this is an early problem – a negative solution or – expression of new sense – which can help one into – what one has not known. "Neutral" expresses an intention."

"People say that my works are "neutral". But if you paint something, it is "something", and it cannot be neutral. Being neutral is a mere expression of a form of intention."

"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."

"Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."

"Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal."

"No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson. Even at the start of his career, he was no believer in journalistic neutrality. … Certainly Thompson is a peculiarly misshapen sort of moralist, one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him."

"In their book-length analysis of Doctor Who, John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado characterize the political outlook of the program as consistent with the BBC's particular brand of political neutrality: skeptical, aggressive, quizzical, and amused towards all forms of political power. In Doctor Who the attitude gets further flavored by the Doctors "Romantic" hero mystique. This characteristic allows him to adopt a "liberal-populist role in criticizing 'sectionalist' forces of 'Left' and 'Right,' and in rebuking the 'official' and the powerful, whether in big business, the military, government or 'militant' unions." … The political form that most resembles these critiques is liberal democracy, which places sovereignty in the hands of the people."

"And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will invite you to neutrality, while he who is your friend will call on you to declare yourself openly in arms. Irresolute Princes, to escape immediate danger, commonly follow the neutral path, in most instances to their destruction."

"The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato. Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

"The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality."

"The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the people of the State; and the nation for that which concerns all the people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions."

"Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is simple, helpful heaping of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, its the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone say against information?"

"Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West."

"No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations."

"The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

"Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities."

"In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation."

"The eloquent Lysias, posing as a non-lover, had concealed designs upon Phaedrus, so that his fine speech was really a sheep’s clothing. Socrates discerned in him a “peculiar craftiness.” One must suspect the same today of many who ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse."

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

"The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action."

"We stand apart, unembroiled, conscious of our own principles, conscious of what we hope and purpose. … Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt."

"We have stood apart, studiously neutral."

"Armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable."

"I had no sense of being inferior or superior to the people about me; I merely felt that they had had no chance to learn to live differently. I never criticized them or praised them, yet they felt in my neutrality a deeper rejection of them than if I had cursed them."

"Surely, we want to be objective if that means telling the truth as we see it, not concealing information that may be embarrassing to our point of view. But we don’t want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don’t play a part in the social struggles of our time, that we don’t take sides in those struggles. Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral."

"In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now. It is a world of clashing interests – war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism – and it seems to me both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts."

"I don't believe it's possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you, as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world."

"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."

"We must not conclude merely upon a man's haranguing upon liberty, and using the charming sound, that he is fit to be trusted with the liberties of his country. It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, — to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves. It is not, I say, unfrequent to see such instances, though at the same time I esteem it a justice due to my country to say that it is not without shining examples of the contrary kind; — examples of men of a distinguished attachment to this same liberty I have been describing; whom no hopes could draw, no terrors could drive, from steadily pursuing, in their sphere, the true interests of their country; whose fidelity has been tried in the nicest and tenderest manner, and has been ever firm and unshaken. The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people."

"Oppression exists when one person exhausts himself through toil and still lacks everything, while another swims in abundance without doing any work at all."

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

"The God whom we know in the Bible is a liberating God, a God who destroys myths and alienations, a God who intervenes in history in order to break down the structures of injustice and who raises up prophets in order to point out the way of justice and mercy. He is the God who liberates slaves (Exodus), who causes empires to fall and raises up the oppressed (Magnificat, Luke 1:52)."

"Stand up, all victims of oppression, For the tyrants fear your might! Don't cling so hard to your possessions, For you have nothing if you have no rights! Let racist ignorance be ended, For respect makes the empires fall! Freedom is merely privilege extended, Unless enjoyed by one and all."

"The more we are oppressed by the cross, the fuller will be our spiritual joy."

"Oppressed and oppressors cannot possibly mean the same thing when they speak of God. The God of the oppressed is a God of revolution who breaks the chains of slavery. The oppressors' God is a God of slavery and must be destroyed along with the oppressors."

"Oppression divides the world into two clans: those who enlighten mankind by thrusting it ahead of itself and those who are condemned to mark time hopelessly in order merely to support the collectivity; their life is a pure repetition of mechanical gestures; their leisure is just about sufficient for them to regain their strength; the oppressor feeds himself on their transcendence and refuses to extend it by a free recognition. The oppressed has only one solution: to deny the harmony of that mankind from which an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove that he is a man and that he is free by revolting against the tyrants. In order to prevent this revolt, one of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one can not revolt against nature. When a conservative wishes to show that the proletariat is not oppressed, he declares that the present is a natural fact and that there is thus no means of rejecting it; and doubtless he has a good case for proving that, strictly speaking, he is not stealing from the worker "the product of his labor," since the word theft supposes social conventions which in other respects authorizes this type of exploitation; but what the revolutionary means by this word is that the present regime is a human fact. As such, it has to be rejected. This rejection cuts off the will of the oppressor, in his turn, from the future toward which he was hoping to thrust himself alone: another future is substituted, that of revolution. The struggle is not one of words and ideologies; it is real and concrete, if it is this future which triumphs, and not the former, then it is the oppressed who is realized as a positive and open freedom and the oppressor who becomes an obstacle and a thing."

"If the oppressor were aware of the demands of his own freedom, he himself should have to denounce oppression. But he is dishonest; in the name of the serious or of his passions, of his will for power or of his appetites, he refuses to give up his privileges. In order for a liberating action to be a thoroughly moral action, it would have to be achieved through a conversion of the oppressors: there would then be a reconciliation of all freedoms."

"All oppressive regimes become stronger through the degradation of the oppressed."

"The rebirth of feminism coincided with the use of the term "oppression." The ruling ideology, i.e. common sense, daily speech, does not speak about oppression but about a "feminine condition." It refers back to a naturalist explanation: to a constraint of nature, exterior reality out of reach and not modifiable by human action. The term "oppression," on the contrary, refers back to a choice, an explanation, a situation that is political. "Oppression" and "" are therefore synonyms or rather social oppression is a redundance: the notion of a political origin, i.e. social, is an integral part of the concept of oppression."

"The Quran urges people who feel vulnerable before oppressors to rid themselves of the influence of the bluffing and false appearances of these oppressors and to compare themselves realistically to the latter in order to realize that they have no hidden or different power that normal people do not have. ... The Quran endeavors to make the weak and the oppressed feel the necessity of daring to defy their oppressors, to resist them and deprive them of their power."

"Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed."

"Islam has been one of the main targets in the Chinese government’s campaign against the Uyghurs, and Islamophobia is being tacitly encouraged by Communist party authorities. Students, peaceful academics and even ordinary people for the simple reason for being Muslims are being jailed, with a massive high-tech surveillance state that monitors and judges every movement, subjecting the widely marginalised Uyghur people to a brutal siege. Internment camps have been set up with up to a million prisoners being indoctrinated and ‘re-educated’, leading to empty neighbourhoods, with major mosques in the major cities of Kashgar and Urumqi standing deserted. Prisoners in the camps are also being compelled to renounce God and embrace the Chinese Communist Party doctrines and prayers, religious education, and the fasting in the month of Ramadan being increasingly restricted or banned. Those who disobey are reportedly subject to torture such as solitary confinement, deprivation of food, water and sleep, and even waterboarding. The reason that so many are being held is because most are arrested for no discernible reason, other than to curb religious practice and erase Uyghur culture."

"It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate."

"The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult for him to penetrate the human origin of his misery."

"Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow."

"The poor were wise, who, by the rich oppressed,"

"No oppressed, people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better, than a mere change of masters."

"In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change."

"Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves."

"One oppression does not justify another."

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed."

"If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression."

"Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else."

"You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

"The war of the poor against the rich is the only way from oppression to deliverance."

"It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning."

"The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people."

"I say to my people’s masters: Beware Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people Who shall take what ye would not give. Did ye think to conquer the people, or that law is stronger than life, And than men’s desire to be free? We will try it out with you ye that have harried and held, Ye that have bullied and bribed. Tyrants… hypocrites… liars!"

"You are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making and live a free, and if you will, a sober and industrious life. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution and has given me his grace to keep it."

"Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world."

"Let there be no hostility Except to those Who practice oppression."

"Let those who choose the Afterlife over worldly life fight for the God's cause. And whoever fights for the God's cause and later be martyred or attains victory, then We will grant him a great reward. And why do you not fight for the God's cause, when the oppressed amongst the men and women and children Say: "Our Lord, bring us out of this town whose people are oppressors, and grant us from Yourself guardian, and grant us from Yourself deliverer!" The believers fight for the God's cause, while the deniers fight for the devil's cause; so fight against the allies of Satan, for the tactics of Satan is fragile."

"Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter."

"Only great men among the unfree and the oppressed are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor."

"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."

"On the one hand, there is the type of sinner whom, in present-day language, we would call ‘oppressor.’ Their basic sin consists in oppressing, placing intolerable burdens on others, acting unjustly and so on. On the other hand, there are those who sin ‘from weakness’ or those ‘legally considered sinners’ according to the dominant religious view.Jesus takes a very different approach to each group. He offers salvation to all, and makes demands of all, but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the first group, an active cessation from oppressing. For these, the coming of the Kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors."

"Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways."

"Your laugh should be such that it should induce courage to the oppressed and fear to the oppressor."

"The universal law of human nature: Where there is oppression there is resistance, and “where oppression grows, resistance grows.”"

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

"The powerful, if they carry oppression beyond a certain point, necessarily end by making themselves adored by their slaves. For the thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. ... It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. ... Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion."

"Revolt, if it does not immediately pass into definite and effective action, is always changed into its opposite through the feeling of utter impotence which results from it. In other words the chief support of the oppressor lies precisely in the unavailing revolt of the oppressed."

"The Bolshevik policy of terror was more systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes. Moreover, it had been thought out and put into practice before the outbreak of the civil war. The White Terror was never systematized in such a fashion. It was almost invariably the work of detachments that were out of control, and taking measures not officially authorized by the military command that was attempting, without much success, to act as a government. If one discounts the pogroms, which Denikin himself condemned, the White Terror most often was a series of reprisals by the police acting as a sort of military counterespionage force. The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repression of a completely different order, which had support at the highest level from the Bolshevik regime."

"At the United Nations, a lynch mob for Israel is always just a moment away."

"Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit."

"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda."

"But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right."

"TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob."

"The aggressive use of wiretaps is important: It shows that we are targeting white-collar insider-trading rings with the same powerful investigative tools that have worked so successfully against the mob and drug cartels."

"ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance into the interior, have though that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names."

"In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices."

"The history of persecution is a history of endeavours to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these."

"National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob, always demented and the second a king, generally sane."

"Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob — not the mob itself."

"The thing that's really cool for me about Miami Beach is you have this dichotomy between sunlight and family and happiness and innocence and then at night, darker, stranger mob conspiracy stuff sort of comes out. It seems like a storytelling engine. You can just keep writing about how those two worlds smash into each other."

"Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand."

"The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones."

"I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak, Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower."

"A hungry mob is an angry mob."