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.

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

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

Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.

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.

Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

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.