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Supposing a man-hater had desired to render the human race as unhappy as possible, what could he have invented for the purpose better than belief in an incomprehensible being about whom men could never be able to agree?
— Denis Diderot (1713-1784), French philosopher
Culture isn’t an either/or proposition, despite what virtucrats such as William Bennett may claim. America doesn’t want Family Values or Godless Decadence – it wants both, or neither; it pays its money and makes its tacky choice…The culture war isn’t winnable, but it is losable…
Culture isn’t an either/or proposition, despite what virtucrats such as William Bennett may claim. America doesn’t want Family Values or Godless Decadence – it wants both, or neither; it pays its money and makes its tacky choice…The culture war isn’t winnable, but it is losable…
In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.
— Spiro T. Agnew, U.S. vice president
The older dictators fell because they never could supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation.
— Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British writer
At times, the comradeship that was the [Vietnam] war’s only redeeming quality caused some of its worst crimes — acts of retribution for friends who had been killed. Some men could not withstand the stress of guerilla fighting: the hair-trigger alertness constantly demanded of them, the feeling that the enemy was everywhere, the inability to distiguish civilians from combatants created emotional pressure which built to such a point that a trivial provocation could make these men explode with the blind destructiveness of a mortar shell.
— Philip Caputo, “Rumor of War”
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism.
— David Davis (1815-1886), U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Islam is justice. Dictatorship is the greatest sin in the religion of Islam. Fascism and Islamism are absolutely incompatible.
— Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni (1901-1989), Iranian leader
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time.
– E.B. White (1899-1985), American writer, editor
Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most impractical. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap and demagogy. Yet democracy is the only form of social order admissable because it is the only one consistent with justice.
— Robert Briffault (1876-1948), British surgeon, anthropologist, novelist
