Notable and Quotable - a collection of memorable snippets

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It's been a little quiet around here lately, so I thought I'd stir the pot a bit by re-posting some "Notable and Quotables" from the Wall Street Journal. For those who don't know, these are little snippets, taken from multiple countries and time periods, and re-posted in the WSJ's opinion pages in a little corner; they usually relate to some current event (sometimes eerily so, when the quote is from 100 years ago and sounds as if it could be from today).

So here's a few snippets I rounded up that I thought were interesting; some are political, some are life lessons, some are observation of foreign events, all in no particular order. The first line in every quote is the source and when it was printed or said, followed by the relevant snippet, and the quotes are from across history, from Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Thatcher. Some you'll like, some you won't, as the quotes stretch across partisan lines, while others are the spears at the front of the lines. In either case, enjoy!!

From Martin King Whyte's "China Needs Justice, Not Equality" at foreignaffairs.com, May 6:

Xi Jinping, the new leader of the Chinese Communist Party, and his colleagues have repeatedly expressed alarm at increasing social protests. According to confidential but widely circulated Chinese police estimates, there are now about 180,000 mass protest incidents each year, roughly 20 times more than there were in the mid-1990s. China's leaders portray the surge of protests as fueled by popular outrage over the yawning gap between rich and poor—a chasm that the leaders have spent a decade trying to close. In reality, though, Chinese citizens are angry about a different gap: the one between the powerful and the powerless. . . .

Chinese are growing ever more conscious of their rights as human beings. They know that there are regulations and laws on the books that appear to guarantee them fair treatment. However, the gaps between proclaimed principles and reality are huge. When they try to follow established procedures to challenge official unfairness, most likely they will fail or even get into serious trouble. And that is why they take to the streets.

Hector Ruiz, former CEO of Advanced Micro Devices [AMD], writing at Dallasnews.com, May 3:

I have always been grateful to this country for the generosity America showed immigrants during my youth: Texas public schools invited us Mexican kids to study for a minimal fee. I graduated at the top of my Eagle Pass high school class and won a college scholarship that would ultimately open the door to a work permit, residency and citizenship. . . .

We shouldn't deny all those pushed and pulled to this country the full rights and responsibilities of being American, and we must not reserve citizenship for a lucky elite. The American dream can exist only when it is continuously renewed for all the hard-working people who cross our borders or sail to our shores, because their dream of a better life—the dream of the millions living here in fear, without documents, and those who long to come—is what has made the United States the dynamic nation it is.

From "Bourgeois Dignity" by Deirdre N. McCloskey, 2010:

One cannot explain an increase of real income in a now rich country like the United States or Italy by a factor of, say, ten since 1900 by citing eight-hour-day laws or protection for women's work (for example, the American protective legislation in the 1920s that forbid women from working more than eight hours, which made it impossible for them to become supervisors who come early and leave late). And if minimum-wage laws could explain a factor of ten, that would be wonderful—an explosion of real income caused by forbidding certain transactions, and moreover by sheer act of Parliament. Unhappily the activities of governments are no such miracle workers. Courts, public health, some police, some armies, civil rights laws, and, until seized by bureaucracies and unions bent on lifetime employment and large pensions, public schools have been excellent ideas. Yet the great bulk of modern enrichment has to be attributed to innovation. Only a tiny part—if indeed it is positive for the poor as a whole—can be put to the credit of government or unions in markets.

Environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus writing at the Breakthrough Institute website, April 29:

Once upon a time, social justice was synonymous with equal access to modern amenities—electric lighting so poor children could read at night, refrigerators so milk could be kept on hand, and washing machines to save the hands and backs of women. Malthus was rightly denounced by generations of socialists as a cruel aristocrat who cloaked his elitism in pseudo-science, and claimed that Nature couldn't possibly feed any more hungry mouths. Now, at the very moment modern energy arrives for global poor—something a prior generation of socialists would have celebrated and, indeed, demanded—today's leading left-wing leaders advocate a return to energy penury. The loudest advocates of cheap energy for the poor are on the libertarian Right, while The Nation dresses up neo-Malthusianism as revolutionary socialism. Left-wing politics was once about destabilizing power relations between the West and the Rest. Now, under the sign of climate justice, it's about sustaining them.

From a speech by Abraham Lincoln, July 10, 1858:

We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of Patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Tim Montgomerie writing in the Times of London on April 22:

The Left began as a moral project but, today, Labour has become a party of out-of-date means, rather than principled ends—a party of the State and vested interests rather than of social justice. It begins with a determination to defend the existing State rather than with an open mind about how to fight poverty.

The Left's detachment from its moral moorings is particularly acute in education. Good teachers are vital to any child's chances of escaping poverty. I still remember great teachers from my own school days but it's all too rare for bad teachers to be struck off or retrained. They are shuffled from one school to the next, blighting one generation of pupils after another. The teachers' unions are fighting hard to stop Michael Gove introducing performance-related pay. They are also resisting requests for headteachers to be able to observe classroom performance for more than three hours per year. Under Labour, the interests of teachers mattered more than pupils. In the NHS they presided over the Mid Staffs disaster and other similar failures.

Manfred Ertel writing in Der Spiegel on April 18:

The Municipal Theater in Piraeus, Greece, was bathed in an eerie light, with yellow floodlights and red torches combining to illuminate the theater's neoclassical façade, which now served as the backdrop for a macabre spectacle: At least 1,000 neo-*** and their supporters had turned out for a march, and red flags bearing a large, black swastika-like symbol flew from the building's front steps.

The right-wing extremist party Chrysi Avgi, or Golden Dawn, convened this demonstration on a Thursday in February to protest an arson attack on its local party office—and to make another display of its strength.

Ringed by a group of brawny toughs, party leader Nikos Michaloliakos, 55, bellowed: "No one can stop us—not the bombs, not all your filth. We will triumph!" His listeners, many of them hidden beneath black hoods, replied with a thunderous "Zito! Zito!" The phrase literally means something like "Long live!" but the affect is more like "Heil!"—and deliberately so. Many also raised their right arms, while the police remained in the background. The right-wing extremists then took their burning torches and marched through the downtown of this port city. Foreigners and any young people dressed in alternative-looking clothing made sure to clear out of the streets before they arrived. The scent of danger hung in the air.

Right-wing thugs have been spreading fear and terror in Greece for months. The worse the financial crisis gets and the harsher the budget cuts imposed by European creditors are, the worse the terror gets on the streets. Foreigners have been attacked, homosexuals chased and leftists assaulted. Some were beaten to death. There are parts of Athens in which refugees and minorities no longer dare to go out alone at night, and streets that are echoingly empty. Foreign merchants have had to close their doors, while journalists and politicians who criticize these developments receive threats or beatings. . . .

Attack victims relate stories of officers who were more interested in checking their residency permits than in tracking down the perpetrators—or simply sent them away. Eyewitnesses also report incidences of open collaboration. One example occurred in October in front of the Hytirio Theater in Athens, after three members of parliament representing Golden Dawn led a gang of thugs in disrupting a play being performed there. When Christos Pappas, one of the parliamentarians, stepped in to release one of the arrested men from a police bus, officers stood by without intervening.

From Margaret Thatcher's "Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World" (2002):

The world we all view so much more clearly now, with eyes wiped clean by tears of tragedy, was in truth there all along. It is a world of risk, of conflict and of latent violence. Democracy, progress, tolerance—these values have not yet taken possession of the earth. And the only sense in which we may have reached the 'end of history' is that we have gained a glimpse of Armageddon.

We now know that bin Laden's terrorists had been planning their outrages for years. The propagation of their mad, bad ideology—decency forbids calling it a religion—had been taking place before our eyes. We were just too blind to see it. In short, the world had never ceased to be dangerous. But the West had ceased to be vigilant. Surely that is the most important lesson of this tragedy, and we must learn it if our civilisation is to survive.

Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass, writing for the National Review Online, June 14, 2011:

As with other nations, the flag is the preeminent symbol of our nation (more so than the other two symbols: the eagle and the Great Seal of the United States). It is displayed from public buildings, private homes, ships at sea, and embassies abroad, always in a manner governed by defined protocol. It is waved and saluted on ceremonial occasions, lowered to half-staff to mark the deaths of national leaders or national tragedies, and draped over the coffins of those who have fallen in the nation's defense. Most of us obey the (unenforced) law that prohibits turning the flag into an article of clothing or otherwise desecrating the flag. Flag burning, though said by the Supreme Court to be a form of protected "speech," raises the ire of most of our fellow citizens—and quite properly so. For the flag, as symbol of the nation, has a meaning and a function beyond what individual citizens make of it.

The nation over which Old Glory flies is also highly unusual—indeed, exceptional. Alone among the nations of the world, it was self-consciously founded on a set of universal principles, stated as self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence (equality, individual rights, consent of the governed), and given operative life in the polity established by the Constitution. We Americans are the privileged heirs of a way of life that has offered the blessings of freedom and dignity to millions of people of all races, ethnicities, and religions, extolling the possibility of individual achievement as far as individual talent and effort can take it. And we remain a shining example of self-government and a beacon of hope for oppressed and miserable people all over the world. This is hardly accidental. The very universality of the American principles, applicable to and affirmable by any human being, means that anyone can become in spirit an American, even before coming to these shores. Americans may choose to live in France or China, but we can never become French or Chinese; but anyone can become fully American, simply by embracing our principles—and also by swearing allegiance to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands.

From Mark Twain's "Roughing It" (1872):

"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything—I haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know anything—but all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I tossed my treasure before them.

There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. Then old Ballou said:

"Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!"

So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.

Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."

Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

From Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics" (2000):

James Cash Penney did not start with a lot of money. He was in fact raised in poverty and began his retail career as just a one-third partner in a store in a little town in Wyoming, at a time when Sears and Montgomery Ward were unchallenged giants of nationwide retailing. Yet his insights into the changing conditions of retailing eventually forced these giants into doing things his way, on pain of extinction. . . . In a later era, a clerk in a J.C. Penney store named Sam Walton would learn retailing from the ground up and then put his knowledge and insights to work in his own store, which would eventually expand to become the Wal-Mart chain, with sales larger than those of Sears and J.C. Penney combined.

One of the great handicaps of economies run by political authorities, whether under medieval mercantilism or modern communism, is that insights which arise among the masses have no such powerful leverage as to force those in authority to change the way they do things.

David Fromkin writing in Foreign Affairs, July 1975:

The grim events at the Athens airport on August 5, 1973, were in a sense symbolic. . . . When the hand grenades were hurled into the departure lounge and the machine gunners simultaneously mowed down the passengers waiting to embark for New York City, it seemed incomprehensible that so harmless a group should be attacked. The merest glance at their hand-luggage, filled with snorkels and cameras, would have shown that they had spent their time in such peaceful pursuits as swimming, sunbathing, and snapping photos of the Parthenon.

The raid had been undertaken on behalf of an Arab Palestine. Yet the airport passengers had done the Arabs no harm. . . .

True, other ages have suffered from crime and outrage, but what we are experiencing today goes beyond such things. Too small to impose their will by military force, terrorist bands nonetheless are capable nowadays of causing enough damage to intimidate and blackmail the governments of the world. Only modern technology makes this possible—the bazooka, the plastic bomb, the submachine gun, and perhaps, over the horizon, the nuclear mini-bomb. The transformation has enabled terrorism to enter the political arena on a new scale, and to express ideological goals of an organized sort rather than mere crime, madness, or emotional derangement as in the past.

From W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939," published in October 1939:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. . . .
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

From Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (1956 edition):

The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that the new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.

Sheila Melvin writing at "The Great Flourishing," a blog of ArtsJournal, March 9:

Newspapers and magazines have recently been filled with reports of the surprising popularity in China of Alexis de Tocqueville's "The Old Regime and the Revolution" which was first published in 1856 and has now reached Chinese best-seller lists. . . .

The aspect of the book that most analysts have focused on is this threat of a brewing crisis, or what is sometimes called the Toqueville Paradox: that the most dangerous period faced by a governing regime is not when the people are most repressed, but when reforms are underway and life is getting better—as has been the case in China now . . . .

China, in Tocqueville's eyes, was the consummate "symbol" of a fully centralized administrative state. Many of Tocqueville's contemporaries saw this as a positive; this was an era in which certain French intellectuals—known as the "physiocrats"—promoted China as a model of near-perfect government.

Tocqueville, however, saw little to admire in the Chinese system—or in the French physiocrats' fascination with it. He argued . . . that highly centralized administration of the sort that China had then (and now) "sapped a society of its movement, creativity, and energy—to a point, as he once half joked, of dampening the erotic spirit. . . . It produced subjects rather than citizens. The consequences extended far beyond the political realm, creating a society characterized by 'tranquility without happiness, industry without progress, stability without force, and material order without public morality.'"

P.G. Wodehouse in Vanity Fair, May 1919:

As regards income-tax, I am, thank goodness, an individual. I pray that I may never become a corporation. It seems to me that some society for the prevention of cruelty to things ought to step in between the authorities and the corporations. I have never gone deeply into the matter, having enough troubles of my own, but a casual survey of the laws relating to the taxing of corporations convinces me that any corporation that gets away with its trousers and one collar-stud should offer up Hosannahs.

The general feeling about the income-tax appears to have been that it is all right this time, but it mustn't happen again. I was looking through a volume of Punch, for the year 1882, the other day, and I came across a picture of a gloomy-looking individual paying his tax.

"I can just do it this time," he is saying, "but I wish you would tell Her Majesty that she mustn't look on me as a source of income in the future."

Douglas Murray, of the Henry Jackson Society in London, writing in the Jewish Chronicle Online, Feb. 24:

In a recent Al-Jazeerah interview, Richard Dawkins was asked his views on God. He argued that the god of "the Old Testament" is "hideous" and "a monster," and reiterated his claim from The God Delusion that the God of the Torah is the most unpleasant character "in fiction." Asked if he thought the same of the God of the Koran, Dawkins ducked the question, saying: "Well, um, the God of the Koran I don't know so much about."

How can it be that the world's most fearless atheist, celebrated for his strident opinions on the Christian and Jewish Gods, could profess to know so little about the God of the Koran? Has he not had the time? Or is Professor Dawkins simply demonstrating that most crucial trait of his species: survival instinct.

Computer scientist David Gelernter answering the 2013 annual question of Edge.org, "What should we be worried about?"

If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word's value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society's ability to communicate in writing decays. And this threat to our capacity to read and write is a slow-motion body-blow to science, scholarship, the arts—to nearly everything, in fact, that is distinctively human, that muskrats and dolphins can't do just as well or better.

The internet's insatiable demand for words creates global deflation in the value of words. The internet's capacity to distribute words near-instantly means that, with no lag-time between writing and publication, publication and worldwide availability, pressure builds on the writer to produce more. Global deflation in the value of words creates pressure, in turn, to downplay or eliminate editing and self-editing. When I tell my students not to turn in first-drafts, I sometimes have to explain, nowadays, what a first draft is.

Gray4lines

Cool little read, although I skimmed a little I especially like Hayek, Sowell, and McCloskey.

xmacro

Among them, Mark Twain's snippet was probably my favorite

beatnic

They all think highly of themselves.

gripnrip

Haven't read them all yet, but will get to the rest. Enjoyed those I had time to read. Thanks-great post.