Stranger Than We Can Imagine Quotes

“As the old Russian joke goes, capitalism was the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism was the reverse.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“The great German physicist Max Planck had been advised by his lecturer, the marvellously named Philipp von Jolly, not to pursue the study of physics because “almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.” Planck replied that he had no wish to discover new things, only to understand the known fundamentals of the field better. Perhaps unaware of the old maxim that if you want to make God laugh you tell him your plans, he went on to become a founding father of quantum physics. Scientists”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“Fourteenth Amendment. When they looked at the wording of this amendment they saw that it granted rights to “all persons.” And so, in one of those inspired flights of human imagination that suggest the involvement of alcohol, lawyers stepped into court and argued that those rights also applied to corporations, because a corporation was really a person.”
― John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“American Christianity did not undergo the church-emptying declines of European Christianity. Its perspective was similar to that of Mother Teresa, who in 1988 said, “Why should we care about the Earth when our duty is to the poor and the sick among us? God will take care of the Earth.” Here God is the “big man” of the tribe who offers protection in return for service. Accepting that the climate could spiral into chaos is accepting that such protection does not exist. This makes working to prevent climate change ideologically problematic.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“The pre-Thatcher state had functioned on the understanding that there was such a thing as society. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to find a workable middle ground between the laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century and the new state communism of Russia or China. They had had some success in this project, from President Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s to the establishment of the UK’s welfare state during Prime Minister Attlee’s postwar government. The results may not have been perfect, but they were better than the restricting homogeny of life in the communist East, or the poverty and inequality of Victorian Britain. They resulted in a stable society where democracy could flourish and the extremes of political totalitarianism were unable to gain a serious hold. What postwar youth culture was rebelling against may indeed have been dull, and boring, and square. It may well have been a terminal buzz kill. But politically and historically speaking, it really wasn’t the worst.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“The initial shooting that led to the conflict was itself a farce. The assassin in question was a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He had given up in his attempt to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria following a failed grenade attack by Princip’s colleague, and gone to a café. It is often said that he got himself a sandwich, which would surely have been the most significant sandwich in history, but it seems more likely that he was standing outside the café without any lunch. By sheer coincidence the Archduke’s driver made a wrong turn into the same street and stalled the car in front of him. This gave a surprised Princip the opportunity to shoot Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Over 37 million people died in the fallout from that assassination.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“Greer recognised that the direction the sexual revolution was taking was not in the interests of women. “Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people,” she wrote.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“There was no such thing as a straight line until mathematicians invented one.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century