Custine Quotes

#1. Custine described them as 'automata inconvenienced with a soul': a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.

Theodore Dalrymple

#2. Hatred grows into insolence when we desire to excel the rest of mankind and imagine we do not belong to the common lot; we even severely and haughtily despise others as our inferiors.

John Calvin

#3. I do not believe I am exaggerating in affirming that the empire of Russia is a country whose inhabitants are the most miserable on earth, because they suffer at one and the same time the evils of barbarism and of civilization.

Marquis De Custine

#4. rather than having it transferred to them through rote memorization or a virtual intravenous tube.

Jonathan E. Finkelstein

#5. What annoyances are more painful than those of which we cannot complain?

Marquis De Custine

#6. Nations have always good reasons for being what they are, and the best of all is that they cannot be otherwise.

Marquis De Custine

#7. The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.

Marquis De Custine

#8. In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm by the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people.

Marquis De Custine

#9. If you have things and if you are a perfectionist, which I am, you have to really tend to them, and it takes energy away from other things.

Nicolas Berggruen

#10. The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.

Marquis De Custine

#11. Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie.

Marquis De Custine

#12. In Russian administration, minuteness does not exclude disorder. Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never do enough to show their zeal. The result is ... that having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.

Marquis De Custine

#13. I may have become Christian, were it not for Christians.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. By 1970, exclusion was so complete that fewer than 500 black families lived in white suburban neighborhoods in the entire Chicago metropolitan area, and most of those were in just five or six suburbs.

James W. Loewen

#15. Every couple of years or so, when Daniel Clowes releases a new book, one can almost sense the rectal contraction across the collective seat of our humble profession.

Chris Ware

#16. If we don't plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don't have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don't have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

Maya Angelou