The Idea That Man Is

If The History Of The 20th Century Proved Anything, It Proved That However Bad Things Were, Human Ingenuity Could Usually Find A Way To Make Them Worse.

The Idea That Freedom Is Merely The Ability To Act Upon One's Whims Is Surely Very Thin And Hardly Begins To Capture The Complexities Of Human Existence; A Man Whose Appetite Is His Law Strikes Us Not As Liberated But Enslaved.

Equality Of Ugliness: If We Can't All Live In A Beautiful Place We Must All Live In An Ugly Place.

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.

The Need Always To Lie And Always To Avoid The Truth Stripped Everyone Of What Custine Called 'the Two Greatest Gifts Of God-the Soul And The Speech Which Communicates It.' People Became Hypocritical, Cunning, Mistrustful, Cynical, Silent, Cruel, And Indifferent To The Fate Of Others As A Result Of The Destruction Of Their Own Souls.