How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), opening sentence.
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d’état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn’t called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
Umberto Eco, Il costume di casa (1973); as translated in Travels in Hyperreality (1986).
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas, The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (New York: Knopf, 1928). This idea was developed by sociologist Robert K. Merton in regards to “the self-fulfilling prophecy,” see “The Thomas Theorem and the Matthew Effect”. Social Forces. 74 (2): 379–422.
The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other states, not between the public powers of rival States.
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (1910).
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Samuel Butler’s Notebooks (1951), p. 221.
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
Warren Gamaliel Harding, speech in Boston, May 24, 1920.