What Marxism was to the society of Economic Man, Calvinism was to that of Intellectual Man: the final, messianic exaggeration of i...ts creed. In both, the belief in the attainment of freedom and equality could only be maintained by sacrificing actual freedom. The doctrine of determination through predestination in Calvinism is parallel to that of determination through the class situation in Marxism. Both abolished actual freedom in existing society to maintain the belief in the reality and imminence of freedom in the coming society. And both collapsed as orders when it was proved that the only society which they could realize was an unfree society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the people over here are coming to realize what would happen if Germany and Italy won a European war. We would be out of t...he picture entirely.... If I were a German conqueror what would I do? Obviously I would have the British navy out of the way and the French army out of the way.... The first thing I would do is look around and say, "What outside territories do I want to take for myself?"... We are not quite ready to take on the United States but we can do it by indirection very nicely. We are going to dominate South America ... without violating the Monroe Doctrine. [FDR set forth a scenario of economic domination of Latin America by giving Argentina a choice of agreeing to German domination of its army by economic blackmail by virtue of the fact that Germany controlled all the agricultural markets in Europe on which Argentina depended for livelihood and the same for Brazil.] It is a perfectly open and shut thing and, if you have the complete, physical power to do it, you win.... [F]rom Hitler's point of view, it is rational. And, if any of us were in his place, with his methods, we would do it. I made myself a hump-back, dyed my skin in several places with great spots of yellow; so that, when I look'd in the glass, I was almost frighten'd at my own figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn o...n those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals--just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to prod...uce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nature of Man and his condition in the world, for the first time within the period of certain history, controlled the formatio...n of the State. The necessity of the colonists wrote the law. Their wants, their poverty, their manifest convenience made them bold to ask of the Governor and of the General Court, immunities, and to certain purposes, sovereign powers. The townsmen's words were heard and weighed, for all knew that it was a petitioner that could not be slighted; it was the river, or the winter, or famine, or the Pequots, that spoke through them to the Governor and Council of Massachusetts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they ar...e receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w...ith the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its ...own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dating at least from ancient Rome, the holiday was a time of public and communal celebration, a time to commemorate some event of ...civic or religious significance that all citizens participated in equally. The set of holidays observed by a given community was a way of defining that community. Each holiday, with its unique history and set of rituals, connected the members of a community to one another, and to the community's collective past. The holiday was fundamentally noneconomic in character. Everyone participated, independent of economic circumstances.... In contrast, the vacation is thoroughly private and economic. People negotiate for paid vacations with their employers. They decide whether to spend their money on vacations or on things, in a way that they never would with holidays. Imagine asking whether to buy a new car or celebrate Easter. The point of a vacation is not to join in celebration with other members of the community but to escape it--at least for a while. People take vacations for a change of scene, and they take them alone, or just with their families.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.... They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »