Editors

"We hear a great deal about sex nowadays; it is possible to overestimate its importance, because there are always people who pay it little attention or who apparently manage, like Sir Isaac Newton, to get along, without giving it a thought."

"I know that when I write, I'm writing for people who can handle high-school math, read at the Grade 12 level, and appreciate subtle humor as opposed to the toilet-bowl kind. I guess that makes the lower cutoff about 17-18 years old."

"I agree. When I hear a player talking about how he "needs" to know about all the other details, I hear a player who is being adversarial to the GM and simply not trusting him to "get it right." Players like that make baby seals die and cause cancer with prolonged exposure. I don't write books for them."

"It ’s no matter what you do If your heart be only true, And his heart was true to Poll."

"I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice."

"I'll tell thee what it [the world] says: it calls me a villain: a treacherous husband; a cruel father; a false brother; one lost to nature and her charities; or, to say all in one short word, it calls me—gamester."

"But from the hoop’s bewitching round, Her very shoe has power to wound."

"The maid who modestly conceals Her beauties, while she hides, reveals; Give but a glimpse, and fancy draws Whate’er the Grecian Venus was."

"Can’t I another’s face commend, And to her virtues be a friend, But instantly your forehead lours, As if her merit lessen’d yours?"

"But beauty has wings, and too hastily flies, And love, unrewarded, soon sickens and dies."

"This is adding insult to injuries."

"Time still, as he flies, brings increase to her truth, And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth."

"Labour for his pains."

"’Tis now the summer of your youth: time has not cropt the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them."

"Happiness is not essential to the artist; happiness never creates anything but memories."

"The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the débris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor."

"Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life."

"... truth was a mortal enemy of beauty."

"I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers."

"Casanova! My dear man, Casanova is not worthy to untie my bootstrings!"

"Christ goes deeper than I do, but I have had a wider experience."

"My dear Duke, I know nothing of the joys of homo-sexuality. You must speak to my friend Oscar about that. And yet, if Shakespeare had asked me, I would have had to submit."

"Shaw's relations with women have always been gallant, coy even. The number he has surrendered to physically have been few – perhaps not half a dozen in all – the first man to have cut a path through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins."

"Just as work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country," [Wilde] said laughing, "so education is the curse of the acting classes."

"Strong men are made by opposition; like kites they go up against the wind."

"I feel convinced that every man has given him of God much more than he has any idea of, and that he can help on the world's work more than he knows of. What we want is the single eye that will see what our work is, the humility to accept it, however lowly, the faith to do it for God, the perseverance to go on till death."

"Courage, brother! do not stumble, Though thy path be dark as night; There’s a star to guide the humble, Trust in God and do the Right."

"My faith is, that there is a greater amount of revelation given to guide each man by the principles laid down in the Bible, by conscience, and by providence, than most men are aware of. It is not the light which is defective, it is an eye to see it."

"Die hbs-scholier die we hebben heeft goede ideeën, maar komt niet geloofwaardig over. Ik denk dat er eerst een wijf overheen moet voor hij volwassen wordt."

"Michelle Pfeiffer. Dat vind ik een lekker wijf. Maar ik moest genoegen nemen met Miss Gouda 1962."

"The Russian bourgeoisie raised the hunt against the Jews, not only in the hope of diverting the anger of the exploited workers, but also in the hope of freeing themselves from competitors in commerce and industry."

"There have been communist leaders – and not just ones whose parties failed to come to power – who moderated their zeal for full communisation. They have included individuals who in their private lives would not deliberately hurt a fly. One such was Bukharin, animal lover, mountain walker and painter. But kindly Bukharin did not abjure dictatorship and terror in principle, and he condoned most of the violence perpetrated by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Soviet state."

"At the Twelfth Party Congress in Moscow in 1923, Nikolia Bukharin stressed that the Nazi Party had ‘inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.’ On June 20, 1923, Karl Radek gave a speech before the Comintern Executive Committee proposing a common front with the Nazis in Germany."

"An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders."

"Speaking of the young C.C. members, I wish to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures (among the youngest ones), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of the dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it)."

"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."

"Military industry was encouraged by an ideology of hostility to foreign states and influences that characterised even Communist moderates. The extent to which Stalin’s rise to power was supported by a military high command concerned by the efforts of the fiscally conservative Communist Right, such as Nicolay Bukharin (also an opponent of collectivisation), to resist the rise in military spending was also relevant. All these factors together contributed to and interacted with an extensive development of Soviet military industry. Stalin was eager to back the industrialisation necessary for large-scale mechanisation of the army. He regarded powerful military forces as a way to defend the Revolution against the allegedly implacably hostile capitalist states, especially Britain and Japan. Moreover, his support for Socialism in one state was not inherently pacific, as he used the idea of international crisis to press for an extension of state dominance, notably with the war scare of 1927, which he did not try to defuse. Bukharin, a prominent member of the Politburo in 1924–9, was arrested in 1937. After a show-trial, he was shot in 1938."

"The foundations of a Communist society are laid by the organization of industry, and first of all by purposeful unification of industry under state control."

"It is true that these courts will gradually change in character. As the state dies out, they will tend to become simply organs for the expression of public opinion. They will assume the character of courts of arbitration. Their decisions will no longer be enforced by physical means and will have a purely moral significance."

"The Red Army has been created by the workers for the struggle with the White Army of capital. The Red Army issued out the civil war; it will disappear when a complete victory has been gained in the war, when class has been abolished when the dictatorship of the proletariat has lapsed."

"In the mater of education as in all other matters the Communist Party is not merely faced by constructive tasks. In the educational system bequeathed to it by capitalist society, it must hasten to destroy everything which has made of the school an instrument of capitalist rule."

"Our ultimate aim is to bring about the existence of a state of society in which all persons who for one reason or another have lost the capacity for work, all those who are unable to work, shall have assured support. We must ensure that old people shall enjoy a peaceful old age in which they will be provided with all the comforts of life; that children shall have everything suitable to their requirements; that invalids and cripples shall be able to live in the circumstances most appropriate to their condition; that those who are wearied and overworked shall be placed in curative surroundings, where they will receive all the care that used to be given to the wealthy bourgeois who were ailing; that no one shall any longer be perpetually harassed with anticipation of hard times."

"The great majority of crimes committed in bourgeois society are either direct infringements of property rights or are indirectly connected with property."

"In the sanguinary struggle with capitalism, the working class cannot refrain from inflicting the last extremity of punishment upon its declared enemies. While the civil war continues, the abolition of the death penalty is impossible."

"In the old law-courts, the class minority of exploiters passed judgement upon the working majority. The law-courts of the proletarian dictatorship are places where the working majority passes judgement upon the exploiting minority."

"During this era when the old society is being destroyed and the new society is being upbuilded, the popular courts have a gigantic task to perform. The process of change has been so rapid that soviet legislation has not been able to keep pace with it. The laws of the bourgeois landlord system have been annulled; but the laws of the proletarian State have as yet merely been outlined, and will never be committed to paper in their entirety."

"In all grades of army life, the proletariat is in control through the instrumentality of the communist commissars, who both at the front and at the rear are mainly drawn from among the workers."

"The political commissars are the representatives of the class will of the proletariat in the army; they are mandated by the party and the military centres."

"In our system of universal military training, barrack life must be reduced to a minimum, so that ultimately the Red barracks may completely disappear."

"In the Russian Soviet Republic, in which all workers can express their will through the soviets, the workers and peasants have for the last two years been electing communists to the various executive organs."