“The tension between the makers and the takers always, always, leads to Socialism's inevitable collapse.”

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad

Dictatorship and Double Standards, Commentary (New York, Nov. 1979), quoted in The Economist , 23 December 2006:131

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 139.

2000-09, Our Duty Is to Remember Sichuan, 2009

Source: The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Ch. 2 : The Printing Press and the New Adult

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)
Context: 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. One cannot penetrate into every individual’s private thoughts, and there is no clear way to judge among different conceptions of the good. So in order to overcome the tension, science tries to combine one’s own and the good in such a way as to preserve neither. It generalizes one’s own as the interest of an average or, better to say, predictable individual who lives his life quantifiably so as to make its study easier for the social scientist. And for the same purpose it vulgarizes the good by eliminating the high and the mighty in our souls (not to mention the low and vicious), transforming our aspiration to nobility and truth into personal preferences of whose value science is incognizant, to which it is indifferent.

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 1, Rationality: Individual And Social, p. 25

Source: Ways of Seeing