“The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants"

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”

Albert Camus

"The older I get, the more I'm convinced the greatest form of 'activism' is raising decent children."
Zuby, a British rapper who took a First at Oxford

"I always regretted that M. de Charlus never wrote anything. Of course one cannot draw from the eloquence of his conversation or even of his correspondence the conclusion that he would have been a talented writer…Nevertheless I believe that if M. de Charlus had tried his hand at prose, to begin with on those artistic subjects about which he knew so much, the fire would have blazed, the lightning would have flashed, and the society dilettante would have become a master of the pen. If he had written books, instead of being admired and hated as he was in drawing-rooms where, in his most remarkable moments of inventive intelligence, he at the same time trampled down the weak, took revenge on people who had not insulted him, basely sought to sow discord between friends – if he had written books, one would have had his wit and intellect in isolation, purged of evil, the admiration would have been unalloyed, and friendship would have been kindled by many a delightful trait."

Marcel Proust

"That city can never attain to safety, in which justice and virtue are trampled under heel; while a babbler directs the state, with the goad of mischief in his hands."
Sophocles, fragment 683

“It is the old age of the world, senectus mundi. There is no other decisive phase to look forward to, no turning-point to fear or to hope for; only the end. On the map of sacred history the time between the Incarnation and the Parousia is a blank; a blank of unknown duration, capable of being filled with an infinite variety of happenings, of happenings all equally at home in the pattern of sacred history. None are privileged above others, God’s hand and God’s purposes are equally present and equally hidden in them all….The interim is dark in its ambivalence.”
R.A. Markus on St. Augustine's view of history.

"Fear is a valid emotion at a time of such colossal crisis. This is one of the greatest movements of people in human history. Just enormous. And to be anxious about that is very reasonable. There is a tendency to say 'those people are racist', which is just outrageous, absolutely outrageous."

Archbishop Welby of Canterbury in March 2016. He also said a response to the great movement of people was needed "at a European level" and the UK must find a way of “taking its share of the load”.

"We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content."
Emile Zola

"There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it." 
Ron Paul

"But how is it that she was able to misunderstand me so, and all this time to conceal from me this incomprehensible hostility to the two Wagners? Am I so difficult to understand and so easy to misunderstand in all my intentions, plans, and friendships? Ah, we lonely ones and free spirits—it is borne home to us that in some way or other we constantly appear different from what we think. Whereas we wish for nothing more than truth and straightforwardness, we are surrounded by a net of misunderstanding, and despite our most ardent wishes we cannot help our actions being smothered in a cloud of false opinion, attempted compromises, semi-concessions, charitable silence, and erroneous interpretations. Such things gather a weight of melancholy on our brow; for we hate more than death the thought that pretence should be necessary, and such incessant chafing against these things makes us volcanic and menacing. From time to time we avenge ourselves for all our enforced concealment and compulsory self-restraint. We emerge from our cells with terrible faces, our words and deeds are then explosions, and it is not beyond the verge of possibility that we perish through ourselves. Thus dangerously do I live! It is precisely we solitary ones that require love and companions in whose presence we may be open and simple, and the eternal struggle of silence and dissimulation can cease."
Friedrich Nietzsche to his sister about his mother

“When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.”
Milton Friedman

"Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority. It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest. Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”."

Matthew Crawford in Unherd

"She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had 'no aptitude whatsoever' for domesticity."
Sybille Bedford

From Justine, by Laurence Durrell, which I have just began.

To end on a very much more edifying note: