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Praise the ones who leave knowing more than they did when they walked in. Emphasise that making mistakes is a really important part of learning and if they aren’t making mistakes we aren’t pushing them far enough.

Strong ideas welcomed dissent. ‘He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill,’ wrote Edmund Burke. ‘Our antagonist is our helper.’ Only the weak and the authoritarian turned away from their opponents and called them names and sometimes wished to do them harm.

Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting views was the place where freedom rang.

Security was the art of making nothing happen. The experienced security officer acceptedboredom as a part of the job. Boredom was good. You didn’t want things to get interesting. Interesting was dangerous. The whole point was to keep everything dull.

Cultural relativism is the death of ethical thought, supporting the right of tyrannical priests to tyrannise, of despotic parents to mutilate their daughters, because it is a part of their ‘culture’ to do so. Bigotry, prejudice and violence or the threat of violence are not human ‘values’. They are proof of the absence of such values.

The former pop singer Cat Stevens, recently reincarnated as the born-again Muslim ‘leader’ Yusuf Islam, was on TV, too, hoping for his death and stating that he would be prepared to call in the hit squads if he learned the blasphemer’s whereabouts.

Now he realised that this little tale about a war between language and silence could be given a meaning that was not only linguistic; that hidden inside it was a parable about freedom and tyranny whose potential he finally understood. The story had been ahead of him, so to speak, and now his life had caught up with it.

‘The act of migration,’ he wrote, ‘puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question.

– the idea continued to nag at him. How to tell the stories of such a world, a world in which character was no longer always destiny, in which your fate could be determined not by your own choices but by those of strangers, in which economics could be destiny, or a bomb?

the great matter of how the world joined up, not only how the East flowed into the West , but how the past shaped the present while the present changed our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention and, yes, belief, leaked across the frontier that separated it from the everyday, ‘real’ place in which human beings mistakenly believed they lived.

instead. He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn’t become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn’t know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be.

To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no ‘real’ genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him;

So are these musings on the philosophy of sAs a result,’ Cruickshank told his sole remaining listener, ‘as a result of a decision beyond your knowledge, a certain lever clicked into place. You saw two plus 102 equals 171. In nature this is what we call a miracle and I, who predicted it, would be called a prophet.’

I must have tortured him by living the life he would have wanted for himself.

Carey, Peter (2012-03-27). The Chemistry of Tears (Kindle Location 1079).

very strange so far

make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. .

Utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity – a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation.(p 77)

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... If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between theUtopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity – a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation.

Huxley was fascinated by the fact that 'thesame person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover etc',

This time round the change is not the resul of a single force, but rather the subtle combination of five forces- the needs of a low-carbon economy, rapid advances in technology, increasing globalisation, profound changes in longevit and demography, and important societal changes that together will fundamentally transform much of what we take for granted about work.

But “repression is a seamless garment,” as Salman Rushdie wrote. This is repression of a kind, and it lacks the clear boundaries that would define the beginning and the end of accountability.

The proportion of America’s workers in labor unions has gradually declined, from 35 to 12.1 percent nationwide between 1950 and 2007; in government, 36 percent are unionized, but in the private sector the figure is only 7.5 percent.

It also failed because its initial disciple, “the world’s first socialist state” as the Soviet Union called itself, mistook government for the citizenry. The welfare of the state was elevated above the welfare of the people, producing a bureaucracy of state ownership so vast and smothering that practically nothing existed outside of it—

The lower the income, the lower the rate of voter turnout. In the 2000 presidential election, 60 percent of all American citizens over eighteen went to the polls. Three-quarters of those with family incomes over $ 75,000 voted, 69 percent of those earning $ 50,000 to $ 75,000, and so on down to a mere 38 percent of those whose households took in less than $ 10,000 a year.