"Rationality...did not have a monopoly of utterance in 1788 and 1789. The kind of eloquence needed to mobilize popular anger to the point at which it could be used as a lever of power was not cool but hot. And the stokers of revolutionary heat were not prepared to allow it to cool off for the benefit of moderate constitutional change. ...From the beginning revolutionary rhetoric was tuned to a taut pitch of elation and anger. Its tone was visceral rather than cerebral; idealistic rather than realistic; most powerful when it was dividing Frenchmen into Patriots and traitors, most stirring when it was most punitive."

--Simon Schama, Citizens

"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."

--David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd

"...Clermont-Tonnerre, as commander of the garrison, was faced with an unenviable decision. It was one that every officer, placed in a similar predicament, throughout the French Revolution--and through countless revolutions to come--would confront. Should he turn his soldiers into the streets to contain, deter or subdue the crowd? If so, should they be fully armed? If so, under what conditions might they fire? Which of these scenarios, if not all of them, might not risk making the situation worse, rather than better? And like many such officers placed in this quandary, he made a half-hearted response, only to find the decision taken out of his hands by the spontaneous brutality of events."

-Simon Schama, Citizens

"And then, all of a sudden, on March 5, 1953, Stalin died. This death was like an invasion; it was a sudden irruption into the vast system of mechanized enthusiasm, of carefully planned popular wrath, of popular love that had been organized in advance by district Party committees.

Stalin's death was not part of any plan; he died without instructions from any higher authority. Stalin died without receiving personal instructions from comrade Stalin himself. In the freedom and capriciousness of death lay something explosive, something hostile to the innermost essence of the Soviet State. Confusion seized minds and hearts.

Stalin had died!..."

--Ivan Grossman, Everything Flows

"High civilization needs seedy poets, artists in garrets, and philosophers who are poor by choice."

--Florence King

"An amiable bachelor here and there doesn't strike me at all amiss, and I think he too may forward the cause of civilization."

--Henry James

"Standing off and saying you don't like the way things are run is kid stuff--any kid can work out a program of more ice cream and less school and free movies and him telling people what to do instead of people always telling him--"
"I don't want any more ice cream, thanks."
"Maybe you don't; but what you're saying is the same damn thing. If things were run according to your ideas instead of the way they are run, it would be much better. Who says so? Why you say so! That's what the dopes, the Communists and so on, all the boys who never grew up, say. Who's going to be better for it? Their fellow-men? Horse feathers!"

--The Just and the Unjust, James Gould Cozzens

James Gould Cozzens (TJatU) on subtleties of workplace politics:

"Four years' service had given him his place in the squabbles and schemings and jealousies and long-holding of grudges that made up so much of the life and world of the school office and the faculty room. Though no longer present, Sam Field would not be quietly released from their talk and thought. In the struggle about to be joined, the coming together in opposition about who was to blame and who would have to pay, they would expose Sam Field anew at every meeting, and retry the case every day for weeks, while his friends hated him for putting them at the disadvantage of having been his friends, and his enemies gloated quietly together, telling each other again and again that they had told each other so."

James Gould Cozzens on impulsiveness and the fateful role it can play: 

"Could he say that confronted by a certain situation he had taken on principle certain steps? He had in fact acted on impulse, in a mood or state of mind in which instead of doing what he really meant to do, he did what he meant to avoid, refused what he really wanted, and with unprovoked pique, out of hand, in a minute, came to new and definite decisions that might--more than might, must!--affect his whole life."