Equality Of Ugliness: If We Can't All

Orders Can Be Benign Or Malign, But The Habit Of Obeying Them Can Become Ingrained.

It Is Only By Having Desire Thwarted, And Thereby Learning To Control It — In Other Words, By Becoming Civilized — That Men Become Fully Human.

There Is Something Deeply Attractive, At Least To Quite A Lot Of People, About Squalor, Misery, And Vice. They Are Regarded As More Authentic, And Certainly More Exciting, Than Cleanliness, Happiness, And Virtue.

Life Is A Biography, Not A Series Of Disconnected Moments, More Or Less Pleasurable But Increasingly Tedious And Unsatisfying Unless One Imposes A Purposive Pattern Upon Them.

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.