JayD

“Don't believe for a minute that this all belongs to some distant past. These are not antediluvian monsters, creatures who pitifully faded away in the 1950s along with the poverty depicted by Rossellini, or were carted off with the ruins of Berlin. These names still exist. Their fortunes are enormous.”
― Éric Vuillard, L'Ordre du jour

“An ideology is not a scientific theory, but often nonscientific and even antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events--though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories. Thus the theory of evolution or of relativity or of the electronic composition of matter are scientific theories; whereas the doctrines of the preambles to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, the Nazi racial doctrines, Marxist dialectical materialism, St. Anselm's doctrine of the meaning of world history, are ideologies.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“Generation after generation the honest and independent, not marrying till they had the means, and striving to bring up their families without assistance, have been saddled with extra burdens, and hindered from leaving a desirable posterity; while the dissolute and the idle, especially when given to that lying and servility by which those in authority are deluded, have been helped to produce and to rear progeny, characterized, like themselves, by the absence of mental traits needed for good citizenship.”
― Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology

“In the grand scheme of business, partisan struggles didn't amount to much. Politicians and industrialists routinely dealt with each other.”
― Éric Vuillard, L'Ordre du jour