It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.

There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.