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The demand for more civility in politics today should be directed toward improving the quality of our insults, seeking civility in wit rather than blandness.

— Harvey Mansfield How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

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More quotes by Harvey Mansfield

Sociobiology reduces the human to the animal instead of observing how the animal becomes human.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

The simplified notion of self-interest used by our political and social science cannot tolerate the tension between one’s own and the good, for that tension leaves human behavior unpredictable.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

People want to stand for something, which means opposing those who stand for something else.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Science, according to science, ought to be the most important attribute of human beings.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

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Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Albert Einstein

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Zedong

Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state.

Benito Mussolini

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

Theodor Adorno The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Harvey Mansfield (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.