Ian Johnston on Stendahl's The Red and the Black

Ultimately, then, for me, one of the main messages of the novel, to the extent that it has a message at all, is the inability of the narrator to pass any sort of reasonable judgment on his story. Inasmuch as he is clearly a successful member of that society, an affluent, well-educated Parisian, who finds nothing but a certain anecdotal amusement. In the tale, I come to see where the source of the real problems in that society might be - the detached urbanity of the civilised person who doesn't care enough, a person for whom the sufferings he relates are unconnected to him, except as an opportunity for many casual evaluative judgments delivered from a detached and superior position, not the vantage, as in Homer, of a sympathetic objectivity, but rather of a sheltered, uncaring amusement.

Then, too, there's the paradox of his attitude to society. For Julien is fiercely ambitious socially. He ha already made up his mind that, despicable as he finds society, his goals are to rise up in that very society. And in many respects his final failure to achieve what Jane Eyre achieves is, I would maintain, linked directly to the fact that he sets himself inauthentic goals in the first place.

In all of this there is a constant sense of how pathetic Julien really is. His vision of himself as a conquering hero in the Napoleonic mode translates itself into complex but endlessly hesitant, self-reflecting and unsatisfying love affairs, which he describes to himself in military language, a style which simply reminds us just how unheroic these achievements are by comparison.

Tony Judt on France and the US

If you want to understand how America appears to the world today, consider the SUV. Oversized and overweight, the SUV disdains negotiated agreements to restrict atmospheric pollution. It consumes inordinate quantities of scarce resources to furnish its privileged inhabitants with superogatory services. It appears to outsiders to deadly risk in order to provide for the illusory security of its occupants. In a crowded world, the SUV appears as a dangerous anachronism. Like US foreign policy, the SUV comes packaged in sonorous mission statements, but underneath it is just an over-sized pick-up truck with too much power.

Joseph Roth in What I Saw

The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. The have discovered the cafe and the factory and the bar and the hotel. Berlin's bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor. Sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night.

The dull sergeant came to represent Germany under Bismarck. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine, the German professor who is in fact the most dangerous (and dogmatic) enemy of European civilisation, the inventor of the philological equivalent of poison gas.

Woody Allen

To you I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dieing.

When I was in school I cheated on my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Robert Nozick, "Anarchy, State & Utopia"

Taxation is a form of forced labour. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

Mohammad Ali on Vietnam, 1967

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No., I am not going ten thousand miles away from home to help murder and burn another poor national simply to continue the domination of white slavemasters of the darker people the world over/ This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of the people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting their own justice, freedom and equality.

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn't have to draft me: I'd join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail. We've been in jail for four hundred years.

Irving Howe on JFK, shortly after the assassination

Would it be sacrilegious to whisper that JFK for all his charm, his style, his intelligence, was not quite the "great president" almost everyone seems obliged to say he was? To enter this dissent in no way affects the grief every decent person feels at the President's death. After all, even not-so-great Presidents, like not-so-great human being in general, have a right to live out the natural course of their lives.

Mr Kennedy performed one deed for which he deserves high credit, and that is the signing of the atom test ban treaty, even though the treaty has more symbolic importance than final bearing, it is valuable insofar as it reflects the desire of almost everyone for an easing of the Cold War. But as for the rest of Mr Kennedy's record, especially in domestic affairs, he was not a firm or innovating liberal, and what is more, he did not particularly claim to be.

He confined himself far too much to legislative and bureaucratic manoeuvring, he did not try to understand the necessity or value of trying to arouse the masses of people to a strongly felt political involvement and participation. His proposals were at best intelligent, but almost entirely insufficient.

And on the critical issue of civil rights, he lagged at first, responded only after a great mass movement of Negroes exerted heavy pressure, and then failed to understadn that there are some issues on which it is better (both morally and politically) to go down fighting than to back away shrewdly.