When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

Equality of Ugliness: If we can't all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place.

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

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

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.

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.