People From New York City

"For one who has read the works of Marx it is frightening to look back at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly hewed to the very course which he insisted would lead to their undoing."

"The book was called Imperialism; it was a devastating volume. For here was the most important and searing criticism which had ever been levied against the profit system. The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world. He saw the process of imperialism as a relentless and restless tendency of capitalism to rescue itself from a self-imposed dilemma, a tendency that necessarily involved foreign commercial conquest and that thereby inescapably involved a constant risk of war. No more profound moral indictment of capitalism had ever been posed."

"But like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses."

"It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy."

"Keynes disdained inside information — in fact, he once declared that Wall Street traders could make huge fortunes if only they would disregard their "inside" information — and his own oracles were nothing but his minute scrutiny of balance sheets, his encyclopedic knowledge of finance, his intuition into personalities, and a certain flair for trading."

"Economic freedom is a highly desirable state — but in bust and boom we must be prepared to face the its consequences."

"If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy."

"The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears."

"To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery."

"The change began with John Stuart Mill and the Utopians. When Mill pointed out that economics had no ultimate solution to the problem of distribution, that society might do with the fruits of its toil as it saw fit, he introduced into the mechanical calculus of the market a conflicting calculus of moral judgment."

"It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future."

"History, as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock."

"Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left."

"There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent."

"Karl Marx did not call for an opposition to the forces of history. On the contrary he accepted all of them, the drive of technology, the revolutionizing effects of democratic striving, even the vagaries of capitalism, as being indeed the carriers of a brighter future."

"The basic function of the military — to achieve victory over the enemy — has been rendered obsolete by the fact that "victory" and defeat are almost certain to be achieved simultaneously."

"The total amount of electric power generated by India would not suffice to light up New York City."

"Today and over the foreseeable future,traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful that it can never recover."

"It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people."

"In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man."

"For it is certain that the future will bring realities for which our traditional optimism fails to prepare us and against which our economic momentum fails to arm us."

"The rise of the welfare state, on the one hand, and of the military bureaucracy, on the other, are instances of the manner in which technology is enforcing a socialization of life."

"We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place."

"In an age which no longer waits patiently through this life for the rewards of the next, it is a crushing spiritual blow to lose one's sense of participation in mankind's journey, and to see only a huge milling-around, a collective living-out of lives with no larger purpose than the days which each accumulates. When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it. If we are to meet, endure, and transcend the trials and defeats of the future — for trials and defeats there are certain to be — it can only be from a point of view which, seeing the future as part of the sweep of history, enables us to establish our place in that immense procession in which is incorporated whatever hope humankind may have."

"As a graduate student at Yale, I studied the whole of Christian theology but focused my attention on the Darwinian controversies. I wanted to get to the root of the conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian doctrine. In the course of my research I learned (to my surprise) that biblical chronology played almost no role in the 19th- century controversies, since most theologians had already accepted geological evidence for the age of the earth and re-interpreted the days in Genesis as long periods of time. Instead, the central issue was design. God created the cosmos with a plan in mind. This affirmation is among the most basic in all of Christianity (and other theistic religions as well, including Unificationism). And that plan included human beings as the final outcome of the creative process: we are created in the image of God."

"Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Wells is a major purveyor of misleading, inaccurate, and incorrect statements about evolution. His book Icons of Evolution (2000) is notorious for its distortions and false claims about evolution."

"Science follows the evidence wherever it leads, but Darwinism does not. So the present controversy over evolution is not a war between science and religion. It is primarily a war between Darwinism and evidence--and the evidence will win."

"The truth is Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but a materialistic creation myth masquerading as science. It is first and foremost a weapon against religion – especially traditional Christianity. Evidence is brought in afterwards, as window dressing."

"There are already scientists-- respected scientists in this country who do experiments on things that most people consider supernatural, such as prayer. When Newton proposed the theory of gravitation it was dismissed as supernaturalism because it was action at a distance. What constitutes supernaturalism in today's science may very well not be supernatural in tomorrow's science."

"At the end of the Washington Monument rally in September, 1976, I was admitted to the second entering class at Unification Theological Seminary. During the next two years, I took a long prayer walk every evening. I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father's many talks to us, and through my studies. Father encouraged us to set our sights high and accomplish great things. He also spoke out against the evils in the world; among them, he frequently criticized Darwin's theory that living things originated without God's purposeful, creative activity. My studies included modern theologians who took Darwinism for granted and thus saw no room for God's involvement in nature or history; in the process, they re-interpreted the fall, the incarnation, and even God as products of human imagination. Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle."

"I would give Wells' book a grade of an "F", because he distorts and mis-quotes scientists and does not write to encourage people to build upon a logical foundation, but rather to blindly accept his "proofs" that evolution is wrong. Wells offers no alternative scientific theory to explain the fossil record. If not by Darwinian evolution, then HOW did life gradually change from single-celled simple bacteria 3.5 billion years ago (which Wells says he accepts), to the present explosion of life in all of its complexity all around us? In short he fails to convincingly demonstrate to me, as a fellow molecular biologist, that most of the "Icons" are really the essential foundations of evolution he claims, and he offers no compelling evidence to me that these are indeed 'frauds'. However, I am seriously concerned that Wells claims himself to be a "molecular biologist", and yet questions the very foundations of molecular biology (DNA makes RNA makes protein) as some sort of Darwinist conspiracy."

"Wells's book rests entirely on a flawed syllogism: hence, textbooks illustrate evolution with examples; these examples are sometimes presented in incorrect or misleading ways; therefore evolution is a fiction. The second premise is not generally true, and even if it were, the conclusion would not follow. To compound the absurdity, Wells concludes that a cabal of evil scientists, "the Darwinian establishment", uses fraud and distortion to buttress the crumbling edifice of evolution. Wells' final chapter urges his readers to lobby the US government to eliminate research funding for evolutionary biology."

"The public be damned!"

"Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for law is too slow. I'll ruin you."

"I would recommend them all [other citizens] to pursue the course that I pursue."

"It is not according to my mode of doing things to bring a suit against a man that I have the power in my own hands to punish.… The law, as I view it, goes too slow for me when I have the remedy in my own hands.… I for one will never go to law when I have got the power in my own hands to see myself right. Let the other parties go to law if they want, but by God I think I know what the law is; I have had enough of it."

"Your waistline may be spreading but you can't blame it on the expansion of the universe."

"Although Bertrand Russell suffered unpopularity in some quarters for his role as a political dissenter, he enjoyed that role immensely. There was more than a touch of exhibitionism in the riskless sit-downs of his last years when he made well-publicized gestures to 'Ban the Bomb' that were as futile as they were ill-advised. I once wondered aloud to him whether his temperamental bias toward nonconformity and dissent was an expression not so much of intellectual courage as of the aristocrat's disdain of the commoner and his desire to épater le bourgeois. He replied with disarming frankness: 'Hook, I think you have something there...'"

"Herbert Marcuse made a lengthy, impassioned response. What good was the Voting Rights Act accomplishing, he said, since the blacks were pursuing the tawdry values as their white fellow citizens? They were accepting the same capitalist values and aping the life-restricting respectability of the middle class. At a prolonged pause in his reply, just as he was getting his second wind, I rose and asked him a simple question: 'Which do you prefer, a situation in which the blacks had no freedom to vote or one in which they had the freedom to vote but chose wrongly?' Marcuse's response surprised the audience--and subsequently perhaps Marcuse himself: 'Since I have gone so far out on a limb, I may as well go all the way. I would prefer that they did not have the freedom to vote if they are going to make the wrong use of their freedom.' For this and other reasons, I suspect, Marcuse never became the darling of the black American students."

"It is better to be a live jackal than a dead lion--for jackals, not men. Men who have the moral courage to fight intelligently for freedom have the best prospects of avoiding the fate of both live jackals and dead lions. Survival is not the be-all and end-all of a life worthy of man. Sometimes the worst we can know about a man is that he has survived. Those who say life is worth living at any price have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they will not betray to stay alive. Man's vocation should be the use of the arts of intelligence in behalf of human freedom."

"I turned to Brecht and asked him why, if he felt the way he did about Jerome and the other American Communists, he kept on collaborating with them, particularly in view of their apparent approval or indifference to what was happening in the Soviet Union.[...] Brecht shrugged his shoulders and kept on making invidious remarks about the American Communist Party and asserted that only the Soviet Union and its Communist Party mattered. [...] But I argued...it was the Kremlin and above all Stalin himself who were responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of the opposition and their dependents. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him. 'What are you saying?' I asked. He calmly repeated himself, 'The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' [...] I was stunned by his words. 'Why? Why?' I exclaimed. All he did was smile at me in a nervous sort of way. I waited, but he said nothing after I repeated my question. I got up, went into the next room, and fetched his hat and coat. When I returned, he was still sitting in his chair, holding a drink in his hand. When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised. He put his glass down, rose, and with a sickly smile took his hat and coat and left. Neither of us said a word. I never saw him again."

"The grim consequences of … Hanoi's victory are now incontestable. The record of the last decade has brought a realization to some, who had been of the same view as Chomsky, of what they helped to bring into being in Vietnam. Protests have been organized against the continued existence of concentration and re-education camps, and the systematic barbarities practiced against dissenters. But Chomsky is still unrepentant. He has refused to join any protest, on the ground that it would serve the interests of the United States. In short, he has followed the double standard to the last, for he never hesitated to utter the most extravagant criticism of the United States on the ground that it would serve the interests of the Soviet Union."

"The United States was taxed with following a policy whose logic was "genocide" for helping South Vietnam deal with "a peasant-based insurrection led by Communists" while the genuinely genocidal practices of North Vietnam in liquidating whole categories of the population were not mentioned. On his visit to Hanoi, Chomsky publicly held North Vietnam up to the world as a model of social justice and freedom. Whenever Chomsky and those who repeated some of his absurd views were challenged, they often cited as their authority someone else who had uttered similar absurdities, as if this vindicated the point they were making."

"Although there was much to criticize in American domestic and foreign policy, what struck me was the one-sidedness, unfairness, and systematic use of the double standard in the attacks against the United States and South Vietnam. … He called upon the United States "to denazify itself," but not North Vietnam or China. What practices in the United States, compared to the barbarous practices of Cuba or of China or of North Vietnam, warrant such a characterization? In those countries how long would one survive who whispered the kind of criticisms Chomsky was perfectly free to broadcast in the United States and be rewarded for it?"

"To silence criticism is to silence freedom."

"Anti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism."

"Schwinger had... been working on and solved some radar related... electrodynamic problems, classical electrodynamic theory problems that nobody else could approach... [A]s a calculator he was amazing... phenomenal. ...You can well argue that radar... as well as new developments in bomb technology, in fuses, played a more important role than nuclear weapons [in World War II]."

"So in 1958 when I went for my thesis exam... and Yang... was in my committee, he and Paul [C.] Martin and Julian Schwinger... I started explaining how the is different from the and Yang said, "Wait a minute... there's no way of distinguishing electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos. It makes no sense to say they are different from one another. It's a meaningless concept." ...I began to explain and Schwinger, seeing my distress and realizing that he was the cause... said, "Let me explain the situation to Mr. Yang" and he patiently explained how an experiment could be done, namely the experiment that would be done in a couple of years... to distinguish electron neutrinos from muon neutrinos, if... they were different... and Yang nodded and the exam continued and I passed the exam. ...[S]ix months later Lee and Yang published a paper explaining how electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos could be different from one another. They simply stole the idea from Julian. He was subject to many such acts of thievery. Years later I met Yang in China... and I described the incident to him... He said, "It is exactly as you said, Shelly.""

"He argued to me that electrons and s, which are particles, charged s we call them, were known... He said that if we're going to have a that distinguishes electrons from muons, then surely... it should not be e- and μ- that have... , it should be the e- and the μ+. So... that way... charge and the new can distinguish electrons from muons... and it followed that there had to be two kinds of s in nature. So built into the way he taught... particle physics was the fact that there are two kinds of neutrinos. ...It was acknowledged as a technical possibility by some people, but it... wouldn't be known until 1963. This was in the 1950s."

"It's true that he had a funny style. His lecture was precise. He had the voice of a radio announcer. Everything was in perfect sentences, grammatically perfect. The formulas were all clearly written on the board. The talk was so designed that he would be at the blackboard nearest the exit door at the end of the lecture. He would end the lecture and... immediately slip out the door and disappear so that his graduate students could not track him down too easily."