Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.

The economic and technological achievements of industrialization in this period were fundamentally mistaken. ...based upon plundering the natural capital of the globe that was created over millions of years: the plundering of the soils and their fertility; the plundering of human communities whether they were our own or someone else's.

For, occupied incessantly with the consideration of the limits prescribed to their power by nature, they [philosophers of former times] became so entirely convinced that nothing was at their disposal except their own thoughts, that this conviction was of itself sufficient to prevent their entertaining any desire of other objects; and over their thoughts they acquired a sway so absolute, that they had some ground on this account for esteeming themselves more rich and more powerful, more free and more happy, than other men who, whatever be the favors heaped on them by nature and fortune, if destitute of this philosophy, can never command the realization of all their desires.

philosophes qui ont pu autrefois se soustraire de l'empire de la fortune, et, malgré les douleurs et la pauvreté, disputer de la félicité avec leurs dieux. Car s'occupant sans cesse à considérer les bornes qui leur étaient prescrites par la nature, ils se persuadaient si parfaitement que rien n'était en leur pouvoir que leurs pensées, que cela seul était suffisant pour les empêcher d'avoir aucune affection pour d'autres choses; et ils disposaient d'elles si absolument qu'ils avaient en cela quelque raison de s'estimer plus riches, et plus puissants, et plus libres, et plus heureux qu'aucun des autres hommes, qui, n'ayant point cette philosophie, tant favorisés de la nature et de la fortune qu'ils puissent être, ne disposent jamais ainsi de tout ce qu'ils veulent. (partie 3, para 4)

In the eighteenth century the English ruling classes – squirearchy, merchants, aristocracy – were men hard of mind and hard of will. Aggressive and acquisitive, they saw foreign policy in terms of concrete interest: markets, natural resources, colonial real estate, navel bases, profits. At the same time they were concerned to preserve the independence and parliamentary institutions of England in the face of the hostility of European absolute monarchies. Liberty and interest alike seemed to the Georgians therefore to demand a strategic approach to international relations. They saw national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three. They accepted it as natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance. Such public opinion as existed in the eighteenth century did not dissent from this world-view. The House of Commons itself reflected the unsentimental realism of an essentially rural society. Patriotism coupled with dislike and suspicion of foreigners were perhaps the only emotions that leavened the vigorous English pursuit of their interests; a pursuit softened but hardly impeded by the mutual conveniences and decencies of international custom and good manners.

Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

The eighteenth century, a century of intellectual rather than material action, would not have succeeded in changing the laws so rapidly had it not stumbled on a suitable vehicle: the parliaments, and most notably the parliament of Paris, became the instruments of a philosophical system.

Whoever did not live in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and cannot imagine what happiness there can be in life. It is the century that forged all victorious weapons against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theater, Painting, Architecture, the Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Sciences, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical, intellectual and even moral appetites, to the refinement of all voluptuousness, all elegance and all pleasures. The existence was so full that if the seventeenth century was the Great Century of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion.

I found that the rich whom I’d envied dreamed of greater riches, and that power came not from obeying the law but from not getting caught.

No serious student who studies the history of the last half century can deny the ferment of ideas associated with the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Their effectiveness in arming the minds of working-class leaders all over the world with intellectual weapons showed that their teaching had an organic relationship with the political and social realities of their time.

The eighteenth century was an age of secularization, that is, it recognized human thought and activity as worldly ventures. Hatred for the priesthood, the hieratic cult, and the liturgy was deep in its blood. Although not an age devoted predominantly to social struggle, it was a period when society was painfully aware of caste. The determinism inherited from the Middle Ages hung menacingly over philosophy and enlightenment, and over its political experiments right down to the tiers état. The caste of priests, the caste of warriors, the caste of landowners-those were the concepts through which "enlightened minds" operated. These castes should not be confused with classes: the above-mentioned elements were all considered necessary to the sacred architectonics of any society. The immense, accumulated energy of social conflict sought an outlet. All the aggressive demands of the age, all the strength of its principled indignation, fell upon the caste of priests.

The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardor and faith in some supreme deed, have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

What has become of the descendants of the irresponsible adventurers, the scapegrace sons, the bond servants, the redemptionists and the indentured maidens, the undesirables, and even the criminals, which made up-not all, of course, but nevertheless a considerable part of-the earliest emigrants to these virgin countries?
They have become the leaders of the thought of the world, the vanguard in the march of progress, the inspirers of liberty, the creators of national prosperity, the sponsors of universal education and enlightenment.

The critics of the New Deal exaggerated the power of the intellectuals and also portrayed them as impractical, irresponsible, conspiratorial experimentalists, grown arrogant and publicity-conscious because of their sudden rise from obscurity to prominence.