Worth quoting (1) ...

For the essence of totalitarianism is contained in the great helmsman's injunction to "put politics in command". This is not just Communist Chinese baby talk. What it means is this: that you are to take over every institution, whatever it may be, and empty out everything which distinguishes it from other institutions, and turn it into yet another loudspeaker for repeating "the general line". Destroy the specific institutional fabric of -- a university, a trade union, a sporting body, a church -- and give them all the same institutional content, viz. a political one. Contrapositively, the essence of resistance to this process by liberal-democrats must consist in trying to maintain the specific institutional integrity of different institutions.

-- David Stove, "Santamaria and the Philosophers", Honi Soit, 43 (32), 29 October 1970, p 11

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Worth quoting (2) ...

All that talk about "liberation" twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists.

-- former Vietcong General Pham Xuan An, quoted by Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, New York, 1999, p 384

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Worth quoting (3) ...

For two centuries, the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas -- until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society -- the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions -- are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will -- perhaps slowly but nonetheless inexorably -- twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

-- Irving Kristol, "Utopianism, Ancient and Modern", (1973) in his Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, New York, 1995, p 198

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Worth quoting (4) ...

Pipes believes its [Communism's] failure was inevitable both because its quest for an egalitarian society required an oppressive master-class whose privilege rendered equality impossible, and because nationalism is a much stronger force than class solidarity. I would add a third reason: Marx was an intellectual crook, who faked, bent, or suppressed evidence to suit his preconceived conclusions. His theory was thus inherently wrong and was certain to fail when put into practice. Not least, Marx's dishonesty deceived all his followers about the wealth-creating power and protean resilience of market capitalism, which thus "buried" Communism, not the other way round. It is worth noting, because it explains so much, that Communism and capitalism are not polarities. Communism is the application of an artificial man-made ideology. Capitalism is not an "ism" at all but a natural process which tends to occur at a certain point of human development, thereafter updating itself from time to time, as survival dictates. Darwin can tell us more about it than Marx.

-- Paul Johnson, reviewing Richard Pipes, Communism: A Brief History, in Times Literary Supplement, January 18 2002, p 11

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Worth quoting (5) ...

[Donald Horne's] central tenet, that his homeland was a lucky strike consistently mismanaged by second-rate politicians, caught on as a dogmatic aid to national self-doubt. As I read on through our recent and gratifyingly rich heritage of commentary and memoir, it became clearer to me all the time that we hadn't become a prosperous and reasonably equable democracy by the accidental dispensation of benevolent nature and a favourable geographical position. The country had been built, by clever people. Our constitution itself was the work of people who had studied history. They were readers of newspapers and periodicals, they were eternal students in the best sense, they were bookish people. They had built a bookish nation. But, as so often has been the case with Australia's consciousness of itself, the problem was to realise it.

-- Clive James, inaugural David Scott Mitchell Lecture for State Library of New South Wales, November 2002

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Worth quoting (6) ...

… we would be playing false to our young people who died in Bali if we were to go on saying that Australia is a selfish provocation to the less fortunate world. Australia is the hope of the less fortunate world, principally because of the example we provide that thoughtfulness and justice and tolerance don't just fall out of the air like the sunlight, but are the fruit of a continuous critical interchange, which could never have been had without the books. It was always true, and now it's time to say so.

-- Clive James, inaugural David Scott Mitchell Lecture for State Library of New South Wales, November 2002