Satire Books

"The private schools, less at home in the world of industry, technology, and science, gave too much attention to Athens and too little to the atom."

"The flaw is that intelligent people tend, on the whole, to have less intelligent children than themselves; the tendency is for there to be a continuous regression towards the mean – stupid people bearing slightly more clever children as surely as clever people have slightly less."

"As men became more like machines, machines became more like men, and when machines were built to mimic people, the ventriloquist at last understood himself."

"Indeed, the more riches a father bequeathed, the more often his children did nothing apart from the labour of spending their money."

"Today we frankly recognize that democracy can be no more than aspiration, and have rule not so much by the people as by the cleverest people; not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy* of talent."

"Even if they had no property, parents wanted their children to find, if not the same job, then a slightly better job than themselves."

"When the basic injustice was remedied, and the intelligent from every class were given their full opportunities, those who would have been enemies of the established order become its strongest defenders."

"If all went to orphanages, all would have equal opportunity, true, but at the cost of making everyone equally unhappy."

"'Intelligence' is as much a qualification for power in the modern state as 'breeding' was in the old. The stress on this sort of ability was produced by a century of wars and threats of war, in which the kind of occupational achievement which raised the national war-potential was lauded above all else; but, say the theorists, now that the threat is no longer so immediate, can we not encourage a diversity of values?"

"As members of a particular family, they want their children to have every privilege. But at the same time they are opposed to privilege for anyone else’s children. They desire equal opportunity for everyone else’s children, extra for their own."

"The classless society would also be the tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man."

"The internal class system was eventually changed by the international class system with which Englishmen were likewise obsessed – for ever discussing whether their country was a first-class power, or (after some setback) second-class, third-class, or no class at all. At the beginning of the last century the fear was of Germany; in the middle years, of American and, even more, of Russian competition; at the end, of the Chinese."

"Parental selfishness had to be socialized - that is, made subordinate to the interests of society. Parents had to be educated to understand it was a sin to seek high positions for stupid children – if they did so, the advantage of the community would be sacrificed to the selfish interests of one small family amongst many."

"The flower of that experiment of the 1940s was the Pioneer Corps. When this indispensable body of hewers and drawers was confined to men with IQs below the line required to get them into the Intelligence Corps, the rise in efficiency was spectacular. The morale of these dull-witted men was better. They were no longer daunted by having superior people to compete with. They were amongst equals – they had more equal opportunities since they had more limited ones – and they were happier, had fewer mental breakdowns, and were harder working. The Army had learnt the lesson of the schools: that people can be taught more easily, and get on better, when they are classed with people of more or less equal intelligence, or lack of it."

"The improvement of communications helped to root out such wickedness by advertising the standards of the wealthy and the glittering lives of thousands of people far beyond his own community to every child in the country."

"Hence one of our characteristic modern problems: some members of the meritocracy, as most moderate reformers would admit, have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern, and so tactless that even people of low calibre have been quite unnecessarily offended."

"One thing the regional centres could not do. They could not measure the qualities of character expressed in effort expended by an employee in the course of his work. Intelligence and effort together make up merit (I+E=M). The lazy genius is not one."

"As for the lower classes, their situation is different too. Today all persons, however humble, know they have every chance. They are tested again and again. If on one occasion they are off-colour, they have a second, a third and fourth opportunity to demonstrate their ability. But if they have been labelled 'dunce' repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering, reflection. Are they not bound to recognize that they have an inferior status - not as in the past because they were denied opportunity; but because they are inferior? For the first time in human history the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard."

"The great dilemma of industrial society is that ambition is aroused, in lesser measure but still aroused, in the minds of stupid children and their parents as well as in the minds of the intelligent. This is inevitable since no one has been able to foresee with complete accuracy where ability is going to sprout. Everyone has to be ambitious so that no one with talents of a high order shall fail to make use of them. When ambition is crossed with stupidity it may do nothing besides foster frustration."

"Men, after all, are notable not for the equality, but for the inequality of their endowment. Once all the geniuses are amongst the elite, and all the morons amongst the workers, what meaning can equality have? What idael can be upheld except the principle of equal status for equal intelligence? What is the purpose of abolishing inequalities in nurture except to reveal and make more pronounced the inescapable inequalities of Nature?"

"Every selection of one is a rejection of the many."

"The success of open competition in government employment established the principle that the most responsible posts should be filled by the most able people; the Pioneers that the least responsible jobs should be filled by the least able people. In other words, a society in which power and responsibility were as much proportioned to merit as education."

"The future development of children could not be accurately assessed at the tender age of 11. The strain upon parents and children of the competitive examination was too great. Once children were shepherded into the separate pens it was too difficult for those who developed late to transfer from one to another. Their chief interest was not, however, so much educational as social; the left-wingers claimed that to segregate the clever from the stupid was to deepen class divisions. They proposed that all children, irrespective of sex, race, creed, class (that was all right but they went on) or ability, should be lumped together."

"Exceptional brains require exceptional teaching....."

"The schools would have failed to fulfil one of their essential purposes in a progressive class system; they would not have been society's escalators for the gifted."

"The egalitarian doctrine that any man can be trained to substitute for any other was so deeply rooted that our ancestors only slowly came to appreciate the full significance of the one simple fact: that all professions are competing with each other for a limited supply of intelligence."

"....and here no lesson has been more simple, and yet more painful, to learn that the fact of genetic inequality."

"One of the symptoms of rampant ambition was the upgrading by name alone of occupations which could not be upgraded in any other way. We no longer have to be so hypocritical. We can recognize inferiority and dare to label it so. But in those days rat-catchers were called ‘rodent officers’, sanitary inspectors ‘public health inspectors’, and lavatory cleaners ‘amenities attendants’."

"The top of today are breeding the top of tomorrow to a greater extent than at any time in the past. The elite is on the way to becoming hereditary; the principles of heredity and merit are coming together."

"Civilisation does not depend upon the stolid mass, the homme moyen sensuel, but upon the creative minority, the innovator who with one stroke can save the labour of 10,000, the brilliant few who cannot look without wonder, the restless elite who have made mutation a social, as well as biological, fact. The ranks of scientists and technologists, the artists and the teachers, have been swelled, their education shaped to their high genetic destiny, their power for good increased. Progress is their triumph; the modern world their monument."

"At the beginning of my special period, 1914, the upper classes had their fair share of geniuses and morons, so did the workers; or, I should say, since a few brilliant and fortunate working men always climbed up to the top despite having been subordinate in society, the inferior classes contained almost as high a proportion of superior people as the upper classes themselves. Intelligence was distributed more or less at random."

"We need ample holidays - history shows that scientists have often hit upon the missing link in a chain of thought quite unexpectedly when they were basthing in the sea, walking in the mountains or drowsing by the Caribbean."

"People of low intelligence have sterling qualities: they go to work, they are conscientious, they are dutiful to their families. But they are unambitious, innocent, and incapable of grasping clearly enough the grand design of modern society to offer any effective protest."

"The upper-class man had to be insensitive indeed not to have noticed, at some time in his life, that a private in his regiment, a butler or ‘charlady’ in his home, a driver of taxi or bus, or the humble workman with the lined face and sharp eyes in the railway carriage or country club – not to have noticed that amongst such people was intelligence, wit, and wisdom at least equal to his own, not to have noticed that every village had its Jude the Obscure."

"Upper-class parents with dull children did everything possible to hide their handicap. They usually made up by their own frantic determination for any lack of will on the part of the children. For instance, they bought places at private schools which would never have been awarded on merit. They spent, for the sake of stimulus, even more on books and travel than other rich people. And, when the combined pressure of home and school produced, as it often did, a person superficially not too dull, the parents eased the loved one into a cosy corner of one of the less exacting professions, such as law or stockbroking."

"Our grandfathers did not fully realize that promotion of adults on merit, with all that it implied for industrial organization, was as necessary as promotion of children on merit."

"As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel."

"I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self–forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore–armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."

"The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things."

"But, as I said before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on. The mere word phase will very likely do the trick. I assume that the creature has been through several of them before—they all have—and that he always feels superior and patronising to the ones he has emerged from, not because he has really criticised them but simply because they are in the past."

"Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable."

"The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground."

"The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing."

"The famous “prose poem” Chicago: City on the Make, originally an essay in Holiday magazine, remains a pungent but sentimental overview of the city [...]. Easy to miss within it is Algren's baseline concerns: how can a society nurture literature when that society devotes itself to consumerism and war?"

"In books such as Chicago: City on the Make (1951) his writing continued to talk of the dark underbelly of the USA, in a voice ever richer and darker."

"Again that hour when taxies are deadheading home / Before the trolley-buses start to run / And snowdreams in a lace of mist drift down / And paving-flares make shadows on old walls / When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel / All those whose lives were lived by someone else / Who never had a choice but went on what was left / Return along long walks where thrusts of wintry grass / By force of love have split the measured stone."

"If my City of the Big Shoulders / Stormy, husky, bawling / Yipping, yapping, yessing, crawling / Would only stop giggling like a farm-boy wearing earrings / On North Wells Street for the first time / Maybe we could find out what kind of joint we're living in."

"Algren's Chicago, a kind of American annex to Dante's inferno, is a nether world peopled by rat-faced hustlers and money-loving demons who crawl in the writer's brilliant, sordid, uncompromising and twisted imagination."

"What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. And in that prose-poem put down some twenty-odd years ago – and what odd years they've been – the ring of a city's awful truth is still heard. Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet."