Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.
Anthony Daniels writing as Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001).
Domination to-day is not a product of armies or navies or wealth or policies. It is a domination based on the one hand upon accomplished unity, and on the other hand upon the fact that opposition is generally characterized by a high degree of disunity.
Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923).
You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
James Baldwin and Margaret Mead: A Rap on Race (1971).
They constantly try to escape
Thomas Stearns Eliot, Choruses from The Rock (1934).
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
W. H. Auden, Epitaph on a Tyrant (1939).
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
If anybody ever attacked democracy, I might discover what the word means.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939).
Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation,” The Nation (July 7, 1956), published in book form in The Price of the Ticket (1985).
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant, “What Is Civilization?” Ladies’ Home Journal (January 1946).
A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”
Anthony the Great, as quoted in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward, trans.
All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter 23.