American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham

• "In his first weeks in office, with John Eaton's help, Jackson was direct with the Indians: either submit to state law or leave. Despite treaties signed and assurances given, he did not believe the Indians had title to the land, and he would not tolerate competing sovereignties within the nation." - 91
• "The president, Jackson believed, should be an instrument of the people against the combined interests of the rich and the incumbent. 'Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment, and they therefore consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects.'...Amend the Constitution, Jackson said...limit the executive to a single four- or six-year term, thus checking the danger of a despot." - 120
• "Never for a moment believe that the great body of the citizens of any State or States can deliberately intend to do wrong. They may, under the influence of temporary excitement or misguided opinions, commit mistakes; they may be misled for a time by the suggestions of self-interest; but in a community so enlightened and patriotic as the people of the United States argument will soon make them sensible of their errors, and when convinced they will be ready to repair them." - Andrew Jackson, 134
• "Jackson's vision of himself as the embodiment of the people standing against entrenched interests, combined with his appetite for control and for power, led him to see the veto as more than an occasional tool. Congress should consult with the president in advance of sending legislation down Pennsylvania Avenue, Jackson said -- a novel notion in 1830." - 141
• "If a mass representative democracy were to work well, a leader's troops could not be -- to borrow a phrase from the Revolutionary War ethos so important to Jackson -- sunshine patriots...A willingness to wage constant partisan combat, no matter what the issue, was an emerging requirement in the politics coming into being in the 1830s." - 188
• "Without union our independence and liberty would never have been achieved; without union they can never be maintained. Divided into twenty-four, or even a smaller number, of separate communities, we shall see our internal trade burdened with numberless restraints and exactions; communications between distant points and sections obstructed or cut off; our sons made soldiers to deluge with blood the fields they now till in peace...The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union." - Andrew Jackson, 249
• "On Monday, February 22, 1836, in a message to Congress, Jackson quoted George Washington: 'There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it. If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times, ready for war.'" - 297
• "The motion to expunge carried, and, after what Isaac Bassett called 'a storm of hisses and groans' from the left wing of the Circular Gallery (the sergeant at arms rounded up the 'disturbers'), the record of Jackson's censure for abuse of power [by unilaterally removing government deposits from the Second Bank of the United States] was marked out of the journal by the secretary of the Senate." - 337
• "For Lincoln as for Jackson, a majority was neither always right nor always wrong. The right would depend on the circumstances. But the president's duty was constant: to preserve the Union, for without the Union no progress was possible." - 356

John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life by Paul C. Nagel

• "In the United States, 'Publicola' [one of Adams' literary pseudonyms] hastened the opening of party warfare. Factions called Federalists and Republicans began dividing over the issues raised by Thomas Paines and John Quincy Adams" - 74
• "His diary abounded with shamefaced admissions of wasting time or of reading to no purpose. What he needed, Adams now declared, was the diligence imposed by a regular schedule, such as one that would come with a seat in the legislature." - 134
• "As he scornfully asserted, ordinary lawmakers, state and national, had one guiding principle, which was to 'be satisfied to provide for the occasions of the day, and leave future times to take care of themselves.'" - 135
• "There are energies in the constitution of Man which a long protracted peace always weakens, and sometimes extinguishes altogether. Occasional war is one of the rigorous instruments in the hands of Providence to give tone to the character of nations." - JQA, 214
• "With the capable assistance of Richard Rush, who had gone to London as his successor, John oversaw the negotiations leading to the Treaty of 1818. This agreement established the northwest boundary between the United States and Canada at the 49th parallel to the Rocky Mountains, and left the region beyond open to citizens of both nations." - 249
• "His was a nature ordained to be darkened by worry, over his relatives and himself. Only a rare time of family joy, an occasional professional success, or, most often, moments of bibulousness could release him temporarily from his torment." - 256
• "Without hesitation, Adams claimed that if the world adopted the metric system, the upshot would bring 'the foretaste here of man's eternal felicity. It would help cast down the Spirit of Evil...from his dominion over men.' If a permanent, universal uniformity of weights and measures was ever achieved, Adams predicted that those who brought it about 'would be among the greatest of benefactors of the human race.'" - 265
• "His most important motive was an unalloyed desire to stand tall in history as a benefactor of the republic and of mankind in general. If the nation rejected him, Adams believed, he would be forever disgraced in history's eyes." - 285
• "All of Adams' scientific and educational proposals were defeated, as were his efforts to enlarge the road and canal systems. A design to strengthen the Bank of the United States as a centralized credit authority and a plan to refinance the public debt were lost. His campaign for a national bankruptcy act was blocked, as were efforts to increase revenue from the sale of public lands. In short, a vengeful opposition was delighted to kick around almost every legislative proposal that hinted at Adams' determination to pursue national development through federal means." - 303
• "The older he became, the more certain was JQA that his only assured way of benefiting future generations was by planting trees." - 367
• "By 108 to 80, a gratifying margin, the House had voted to approve Adams' resolution rescinding the hated gag rule. Thereafter, petitioners who urged the abolition of slavery and the slave trade would be freely heard. But it seemed an anticlimax, given the far graver challenge of Texas." - 403

The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness by Harlow Giles Unger

• "An ardent Freemason, Lafayette viewed the Revolutionary War as more than a war to liberate thirteen colonies from Britain; he believed it represented a worldwide conflict to liberate mankind from tyranny of all kinds, religious as well as political. Monroe instantly embraced the broadened concept, seeing beyond national borders for the first time and growing passionate about the rights of man." - 28
• "Monroe had, as a young man, believed that expansion of individual liberties was central to the policies of modern governments born of revolution and, indeed, that revolutions would eventually tear down national boundaries and unite mankind. Now he recognized that protection of national interests was the raison d'etre of all governments, whether born of revolution or not. Expansion of individual liberties had simply been a by-product of the American Revolution because it was essential for uniting the American people and, therefore, in the national interest." - 178
• "With the government bankrupt and no central bank from which to borrow, Monroe ignored both the law and the Constitution and seized power. Saying he was the government of the United States, he intimidated private banks and municipal corporations into lending him more than $5 million on his own signature." - 248
• "Possessing as we do all the raw materials, the fruits of our own soil and industry, we ought not to depend in the degree we have done on supplies from other countries" -  James Monroe, 263
• "Marshall's Federalist rulings gave Republican Monroe the constitutional tools he needed to expand the United States into an American empire and lead the American people into the greatest period of extended prosperity in the nation's history." - 264
• "After assuming the presidency, Monroe remained irate about the Federalist-led secessionist movement in New England during the war. Equating secessionism with treason, he excluded Federalists from the cabinet and pledged 'to prevent the reorganization and revival of the federal party.'" - 267
• Monroe "told Congress, 'the revenue arising from imposts and tonnage and from the sale of public lands will be fully adequate to the support of the civil government...without the aid of internal taxes. I consider it my duty to recommend to Congress their repeal.' And with that, Congress abolished all property taxes and other internal taxes in the United States." - 276
• "In addition to ceding the Floridas, the Adams-Onis, or Transcontinental Treaty, defined western limits of the Louisiana Territory, with the Spanish ceding all claims to the Pacific Northwest and extending nominal U.S. sovereignty to the Pacific Ocean." - 293
• "Without a political party to control individual political ambitions, the president had no mechanism to discipline his own cabinet members, let alone members of Congress...In effect, Monroe had created political anarchy and, in doing so, he not only rendered himself politically impotent, he permitted new divisions based on personal political ambitions to form between political leaders." - 310
• "As the Duke of Wellington had warned, no nation on earth was powerful enough to sustain military supply lines long enough to challenge American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. With the Monroe Doctrine, most European leaders realized it would be far less costly to trade with the Americans than to try to subjugate them." - 317

History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison by Henry Adams

• "In truth, the manufactories of New England were created by the embargo, which obliged the whole nation to consume their products or to go without." - 16
• "Macon's Bill No. 2 [April 7, 1810] marked the last stage toward the admitted failure of commercial restrictions as a substitute for war." - 137
• "'This scene on the Continent,' he continued to Jefferson, 'and the effect of English monopoly on the value of our produce are breaking the charm attached to what is called free-trade, foolishly by some and wickedly by others.' He [Madison] reverted to his life-long theory of commercial regulations." - 205
• "England and the United States, like two vultures, hovered over the expiring empire, snatching at the morsels they most coveted, while the unfortunate Spaniards, to whom the rich prey belonged, flung themselves, without leadership or resources, on the ranks of Napoleon's armies. England pursued her game over the whole of Spanish America, if not by government authority, more effectively by private intrigue; while the United States for the moment confined their activity to a single object [West Florida], not wholly without excuse." - 213
• "No acid ever worked more mechanically on a vegetable fibre than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached, the nearest Indian tribes withered away." - 343
• "Men would do little but talk politics, and very few professed themselves satisfied with the condition into which their affairs had been brought. The press cried for war or for peace, according to its fancy; but although each of the old parties could readily prove the other's course to be absurd, unpatriotic, and ruinous, the war men, who were in truth a new party, powerless to restore order by legitimate methods, shut their ears to the outcry, and waited until actual war should enforce a discipline never to be imposed in peace." - 439
• "In every respect as the Federalists looked back on the past twelve years their prophecies had come true. The Republican party, they argued, had proved itself incompetent, and had admitted the failure of its principles; it had been forced to abandon them in practice, to replace the government where the Federalists had put it, and to adopt all the Federalists' methods; and even then the party failed...The government was ruined in credit and character; bankrupt, broken, and powerless, it continued to exist merely because of habit...Society held itself together merely because it knew not what else to do." - 666
• "All great nations had fought, and at one time or another every great nation in Europe had been victorious over every other; but no people, in the course of a thousand years of rivalry on the ocean, had invented or had known how to sail a Yankee schooner." - 841
• John Quincy Adams "had been allowed to seem to kindle the greatest war of modern times, and had been invited to make use of Russia against England; but the Czar's reasons for granting such favor were mysterious even to Adams, for while Napoleon occasionally avowed motives, Alexander never did. Russian diplomacy moved wholly in the dark." - 857
• "I am not anxious to accelerate the approach of the period when the great mass of American labor shall not find employment in the field; when the young men of the country shall be obliged to shut their eyes upon external Nature, ---upon the heavens and the earth, -- and immerse themselves in close and unwholesome workshops" - Daniel Webster, 879
• "With the repeal of the embargo [on April 14, 1814] ended the early period of United States history, when diplomatists played a part at Washington equal in importance to that of the Legislature or the Executive. The statecraft of Jefferson and Madison was never renewed. Thenceforward the government ceased to balance between great foreign Powers, and depended on its own resources." - 892
• "The Treasure was bankrupt. The formal stoppage of payments in interest on the debt was announced, November 9 [, 1814], by an official letter from the secretary [Dallas], notifying holders of government securities in Boston that the Treasury could not meet its obligations, and that 'the government was unable to avert or to control this course of events.' After that date the Treasury made no further pretense of solvency." - 1079
• "Of all the machinery created by the Constitution, the House alone directly reflected and represented the people; and if the people disliked it, they disliked themselves." - 1272
• "The continent lay before them, like an uncovered ore-bed. They could see, and they could even calculated with reasonable accuracy, the wealth it could be made to yield. With almost the certainty of a mathematical formula, knowing the rate of increase of population and of wealth, they could read in advance their economical history for at least a hundred years." - 1300
• "A people which had in 1787 been indifferent or hostile to roads, banks, funded debt, and nationality, had become in 1815 habituated to ideas and machinery of the sort on a great scale." - 1314
• "Should history ever become a true science, it must expect to establish its laws, not from the complicated story of rival European nationalities, but from the economical evolution of a great democracy." - 1333
• "In a democratic ocean science could see something ultimate. Man could go no further. The atom might move, but the general equilibrium could not change." - 1335

History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson by Henry Adams

• "Until they [Americans] were satisfied that knowledge was money, they would not insist upon high education; until they saw with their own eyes stones turned into gold, vapor into cattle and corn, they would not learn the meaning of science." - 53
• "The political partnership between the New York Republicans and the Virginians was from the first that of a business firm." - 80
• "Jefferson aspired beyond the ambition of a nationality, and embraced in his view the whole future of man...Hoping for a time when the world's ruling interests should cease to be local and should become universal; when questions of boundary and nationality should  become insignificant...he set himself to the task of governing, with the golden age in view." - 101
• "in the foreigner's range of observation, love of money was the most conspicuous and most common trait of American character." - 112
• "the new President found in the Constitutional power 'to regulate commerce with foreign nations' the machinery for doing away with navies, armies, and wars." - 144
• "as he privately declared and as was commonly believed, the actual office-holders were monarchists at heart, and could not be trusted to carry the new Republican principles into practice, the public welfare required great changes. For the first time in national experience, the use of patronage needed some definite regulation." - 152
• "The essence of Virginia republicanism lay in a single maxim: The government shall not be the final judge of its own powers." - 174
• "The whole of Jefferson's theory of internal politics...rested in the Act making an annual appropriation of $7,300,000 for paying interest and capital of the public debt; and in the Act for repealing the internal taxes." - 185
• April 30, 1802: "Perhaps the most important legislation of the year...authorized the people of Ohio to form a Constitution and enter the Union...Gallatin inserted into the law a contract, which bound the State and nation to set aside the proceeds of a certain portion of the public lands for the use of schools and for the construction of roads between the new State and the seaboard. This principle, by which education and internal improvements were taken under the protection of Congress, was a violation of the States-rights theories, against which, in after years, the strict constructionists protested" - 205
• "That the Spaniards should dread and hate the Americans was natural...In their eyes, United States citizens proclaimed ideas of free-trade and self-government with no other object than to create confusion, in order that they might profit by it." - 231
• "Peace is our passion, and wrongs might drive us from it. We prefer trying every other just principle, right and safety, before we would recur to war." - Jefferson, 300
• "Bonaparte had been taught by Talleyrand that America and England, whatever might be there mutual jealousies, hatred, or wars, were socially and economically one and indivisible." - 337
• "The Louisianians, it was said, had shed tears when they saw the American flag hoisted in place of the French; they were not prepared for self-government." - 385
• "The doctrines of 'strict construction' could not be considered as the doctrines of the government after they had been abandoned in this leading case [Louisiana] by a government controlled by strict constructionists." - 386
• "Jefferson wanted no treaties which could prevent him from using commercial weapons against nations that violated American neutrality; and therefore he reserved to Congress the right to direct commerce in whatever paths the Government might prefer." - 542
• "With nations, as with individuals, our interests, soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties" - Jefferson, 603
• "It is beyond question that there exists in this country an infinite number of adventurers, without property, full of ambition, and ready to unite at once under the standard of a revolution which promises to better their lot." - 767
• "France [under Napoleon] had made all Europe violent and brutal; but England could boast that at the sound of British cannon the chaos had become order, that the ocean had been divided from the land, and as far as the ocean went, that her fleets made law. Two Powers only remained to be considered by Great Britain, -- Russia and the United States. Napoleon showed an evident intention to take charge of the one; England thought herself well able to give law to the other." - 876
• "In charging America with having lost her national character, Napoleon said no more than the truth. As a force in the affairs of Europe, the United States had become an appendage to England." - 1020
• "The Federalists of 1801 were the national party of America; The Federalists of 1808 were a British faction in secret league with George Canning." - 1094
• "the principle was thus settled that the Constitution, under the power to regulate commerce, conferred upon Congress the power to suspend foreign commerce forever; to suspend or otherwise regulate domestic inter-state commerce; to subject all industry to governmental control, if such interference in the opinion of Congress was necessary or proper for carrying out its purpose; and finally, to vest in the President discretionary power to execute or to suspend the system, in whole or in part." - 1111
• "He had undertaken to create a government which should interfere in no way with private action, and he had created one which interfered directly in the concerns of every private citizen in the land. He had come into power as the champion of States-rights, and had driven States to the verge of armed resistance. He had begun by claiming credit for stern economy, and ended by exceeding the expenditure of his predecessors. He had invented a policy of peace, and his invention resulted in the necessity of fighting at once the two greatest Powers in the world." - 1239

A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel

• "'We have reached a phase where we are discovering both the limited validity of the concept of civilization and the need to transcend that concept...The phase of civilizations is coming to an end, and for good or ill humanity is embarking on a new phase' -- that of a single civilization which could become universal." - 8, Raymond Aron
• "Society and civilization are inseparable: the two ideas refer to the same reality." - 16
• "For Levi-Strauss, then, primitive cultures are the fruit of egalitarian societies, where relations between groups are settled once and for all and remain constant, whereas civilizations are based on hierarchical societies with wide gaps between groups and hence shifting tensions, social conflicts, political struggles, and continual evolution." - 17
• "In Europe from the sixteenth century onwards (and probably earlier), the ultimate phase of civilization wears the emblem of capitalism and wealth." - 20
• "The history of a civilization, then, is a search among ancient data for those still valid today." - 24
• "Every generation, at all events, likes to contradict its predecessor; and its successor will do the same and more." - 25
• "A civilization generally refuses to accept a cultural innovation that calls in question one of its own structural elements." - 29
• "A civilization attains its true persona by rejecting what troubles it in the obscurity of that no man's land which may already be foreign territory. Its history is the centuries-long distillation of a collective personality, caught like any individual between its clean, conscious objective and its obscure, unconscious fate, whose influence on aims and motives is often unobserved." - 31-2
• "A civilization, then, is neither a given economy nor a given society, but something which can persist through a series of economies or societies, barely susceptible to gradual change." - 35

The Near East

• "Muslim Civilization, like Western civilization, is derivative -- a civilization of the second degree [Albert Weber]. It was not built on a tabula rasa, but on the lava of that fluid, lively and motley civilization which preceded it in the Near East." - 43
• "Islam has never enjoyed stable sufficiency, still less abundance. Any abundance has always been temporary, the fruit of a passing fashion for some luxury item, or the privilege of some especially fortunate town." - 59
• Islam "brought together the three great cultural zones of the Old World -- the Far East, Europe and Black Africa. Nothing could pass between them without its consent or tacit acquiescence. It was their intermediary." - 62
• "For four or five centuries, Islam was the most brilliant civilization in the Old World. That golden age lasted, broadly speaking, from the reign of Mamun, the creator of the House of Science in Baghdad...to the death of Averroes, the last of the great Muslim philosophers, which took place in Marrakesh in 1198." - 73
• "Paradoxical as it may seem, Islamic civilization as a whole, between 813 and 1198, was both one and many, universal and regionally diverse." - 77
• "In the tenth century when the Muslim empire split, each region recovered something of its independence...A new geographical pattern began to take shape." - 78-9
• "Muslim humanism...five names stand out: Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Gazali and Averroes." - 81
• "Al-Kindi sailed on religious waters that raised no storms; Avicenna was undeniably idealistic; Averroes was a philosopher for the end of the world. Al-Gazali, the defender of the faith, made his own the stubborn dogma of early Muslim theologians: he sought to ignore or even to destroy peripatetic philosophy, for his own thought led him into very different, mystical paths. He renounced the world to take up the white woolen mantle of suf warn by the Sufi, adherents of mystical faith rather than rational theology. They were known as 'God's fools'." - 84
• "The seasons of history cause the flowers and the fruit to fall, but the tree remains. At the very least, it is much harder to kill." - 87
• "the essential, insistent characteristic of Islam today is precisely its internal divisions, the insidious fragmentation of its identity and its lands." - 95

Black Africa

• "On the one hand, the colonists' contribution partially destroyed old structures; on the other, it replaced them very imperfectly." - 103
• "In itself, mechanization is not a civilization." - 113
• "The first of these Niger empires, Ghana, seems to have been established around AD 800...Attacked by the Muslims, the capital was captured and destroyed in 1077. But because the trade in gold continued..., another Empire soon came into being slightly to the East...This was the Mali Empire." - 128
• "The Atlantic sea-route discovered by the Portuguese became the new channel for Black African gold, and although this did not kill the Saharan trade it greatly weakened it." - 129
• "It has to be recognized, frankly, that the European slave trade stopped at the very moment when America no longer urgently needed it." - 132
• "Africa is not really one entity...It was effected above all by Islam, with its social and intellectual prestige and its admittedly mediocre Koranic schools...The second great outside influence was that of Christianity, which generally developed where trade was most intense." - 138
• "Senghor [former president of Senegal] has even spoken of an African 'physiology' which dictates a certain 'emotive attitude' to the world, so that 'the magic world is more real to the Black African than the visible world' -- a path to knowledge, in fact." - 150

The Far East

• In northwest China "the nomads were former peasants. The development of more advanced agriculture had forced out those less able to master it, towards the mountain country of the 'forest-eaters', and above all to the edges of the deserts and the steppes...In this way, civilization had been 'the mother of barbarism': it had turned farmers into nomadic shepherds." - 165
• "For India as for China, these tidal waves of invasion meant repeated destruction and setbacks. In the long run, both absorbed their invaders, but at very great cost." - 167
• "In the third century, Chandragupta and Ashoka founded the first Empire, which united Afghanistan and all of India except the southern tip of the Deccan, always beyond the conqueror's grasp." - 167
• "The civilizations of the Far East were entities which very early achieved remarkable maturity, but in a setting that made some of their essential structures almost impervious to change. This gave them astonishing unity and cohesion. But they also found it extremely difficult to adapt themselves, to want to evolve and to be able to. It was as if they had systematically rejected the idea of growth and progress." - 168
• "Unlike the West, which clearly separates the human from the sacred, the Far East makes no such distinction. Religions is involved with all aspects of human life: the state, philosophy, ethics and social relations. All fully partake of the sacred; and this is what gives them their perennial resistance to change." - 169
• "In the most agnostic or the most conformist of the Chinese there is a latent anarchic and mystic...The Chinese are either superstitious or practical, or rather they are both at once." - Marcel Granet, 171-2
• "It was clearly rationalist, in reaction against ancient religion; but it was also a reaction against the rhetorical excesses of the sophists...Confucianism, in fact, was a return to order in three respects -- intellectual, political and social." - 175
• "In the face of Confucianism, the traditionalist partisan of social order, Taoism was always the symbol of individualism, personal freedom and rebellion." - 181
• "The basis of Chinese society was largely agricultural and proletarian, with an enormous mass of needy peasants and impoverished city-dwellers...everyone constantly wished a violent death on usurers and moneylenders." - 193
• "From the sixteenth century onwards, China was in touch with European trade." - 199
• "The Opium War of 1840 to 1842 opened five treaty ports to Westerners, including Canton and Shanghai (by the Treaty of Nanking). The T'ai-p'ing rebellion enabled the Westerners to intrude further, in 1860, and secure the opening of seven more treaty ports." - 200
• "The double problem remained difficult to solve. The Western 'Barbarians' had to be driven out; but to achieve this China had to learn the science and technology of the West." - 203
• "The first humiliation was for China to find herself reduced to being one nation among many: the second was to be dominated by the Barbarians with their science and their arms. Chinese nationalism today, fierce and virulent as it is, can be seen as revenge -- the firm decision to become a great nation, the great nation" - 213
• "In the South [of India] is Deccan, a region of conservative peoples and civilizations, obstinately resisting change." - 217
• "Throughout India's history, whenever its richest regions were no longer flourishing under the stimulus of large-scale trade, the great unifying Empires crumbled." - 227-8
• "The turbid waters of Hinduism -- of Indian civilization itself -- submerged Buddhism as they did Jainism...the saint or 'renouncer' would always attract a following. Bowed down by the weight of a close-knit, inescapable society, the dominant religion allowed individual liberty only in the form of abnegation, of 'non-action'." - 231
• "Even before the defeat of the French in 1763, Robert Clive's victory at Plassey...on June 1757, in effect inaugurated British India." - 237
• "By 1604, when they drove the Portuguese out of Malacca, the Dutch had become the rulers of the whole Indonesian archipelago" - 263
• "There was already by now [2nd -3rd c. AD] a political and religious system, whose primitive beliefs deified the various forces of nature. Profoundly conservative, Japan never abandoned this religion, which long afterwards, in the nineteenth century, came to be called Shinto (the way of the Gods)." - 279
• "the Empire gave way to the Shoguns, who ruled Japan from 1191 to 1863 -- the seemingly interminable counterpart of the Middle Ages of Europe." - 283
• "Japan's break with the outside world lasted more than two centuries, until the Revolution which began the Meiji era in 1868, soon followed by the intense industrialization of the country." - 290
• "Before the outbreak of war in 1942, fifteen families at most accounted for more than 80 percent of Japan's capital." - 293
• "By comparison with other countries, Japan is not particularly religious, not particularly concerned with the after-life. In this, it is the opposite of India." - 300

Europe

• "The history of Europe has everywhere been marked by the stubborn growth of private 'liberties', franchises or privileges limited to certain groups, big or small. Often, these liberties conflicted with each other or were mutually exclusive." - 307
• "There could be no feudalism, in Europe or elsewhere, without the previous fragmentation of a larger political entity...the huge Carolingian Empire -- the first 'Europe', its name affirmed as such (Europa, vel regnum Caroli)" - 313
• "complete liberty could be achieved only through material prosperity sufficient to enable certain specially favoured towns not merely to guarantee their economic survival but also to provide for their external defence. These were city-states." - 320
• "The [developing territorial] States [of Europe] were aided by the loyalty of the masses, who saw the Monarch as their natural protector against the Church and the nobles." - 323
• "Every State wanted to be isolated, uncontrolled and free; reasons of State became the ultimate law." - 323
• "The will of the sovereign invaded the State. 'Das Ich wird der Staat' -- 'The I becomes the State' -- wrote a German historian." - 324
• "Economic liberalism, which presupposed equal competition among individuals, was no more than a pious fiction. The more time went by, the more the enormity of that fiction became obvious." - 330
• "With Catholicism, spiritual conflicts are in that sense public; one is obliged to state one's position. In Protestant society such conflicts certainly exist, but they take place in private." - 356
• "Europe has always been, and still is, revolutionary. All its history confirms that fact. But at the same time it has always been, and still is, endlessly counter-revolutionary." - 356
• "A 'real' revolution is always against a modern State: that is essential. And it always comes from within, with a view to the State's reforming itself." - 357
• "You are lost if you forget that land belongs to no one and its fruits belong to everyone." - Rousseau, 362
• "The textile industry, however, was the main driving-force...being both a producer of basic necessities and a provider of luxuries. According to Max Weber, the textile industry's ups and downs dominate all the material past of the West.: - 378
• "State capitalism has become a leading feature of the scene. In the 'nationalized' sectors of those economies where state control has increased, the State itself has become an industrialist and a banker." - 387
• "Originally chamber music meant secular music, or that of the court as distinct from that of the Church...Chamber music was above all a form of dialogue: it was the art of conversation." - 402
• "Through their literature, nations once more become characters, individuals whom once can try to analyse -- even to psychoanalyse -- with the help of this essential evidence." - 406
• "For centuries, Europe has been enmeshed in what has amounted to a single economy." - 407
• "Unity by force always failed. The only moral of this monotonous story is that violence has never been enough to enable anyone to seize the whole of Europe." - 418

America

• "With the end of France's Empire in America in 1762, Britain's aid to the colonies at once became less vital and her demands upon them became more onerous." - 466
• "It mattered little that the American Constitution was thought to be revolutionary, new, egalitarian and fair, in so far as it sought to balance against each other the impulses of the human animal, always selfish and fierce." - 468
• "The Founding Fathers believed that a well-thought-out State would check interest by interest, class by class, faction by faction, and one branch of government by another, in a harmonious system of mutual frustration." - Richard Hofstadter, 469
• "the economic evolution of the United States has compelled the Federal State to intervene, with care, as a 'countervailing power'...What it now had to do was to analyse in depth the various elements in the economic situation, to predict its likely development, using all the tools of modern economic science, and to be ready at any time to act in this sector or that, whether to mop up unemployment, stimulate production, curb inflation or whatever was needed." - 494
• "The golden rule for world peace is surely to think with, not against; and for a whole generation both the United States and the Soviet Union obstinately thought against each other." - 502
• "the American writer is an as asocial being who is not content merely to express his revulsion or his unease at the world around him, but lives out his rebellion and constantly pays the price in pain and solitude." - 504
• "The break with France in 1763 was a wound that has still not healed: the French Canadians felt shamelessly abandoned." - 510

Russia

• "Russian territory acted as an enormous frontier zone between Europe, which it protected, and Asia, whose violent blows it painfully absorbed." - 528

Capital: Volume 1, Chapters 31-33 by Karl Marx

Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist

1. "the Middle Ages had handed down two distinct forms of capital, which ripened in the most varied economic formations of society, and which, before the era of the capital mode of production, nevertheless functioned as capital -- usurer's capital and merchant's capital." - 914
2. "The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into industrial capital by the feudal organization of the countryside and the guild organization of the towns. These fetters vanished with the dissolution of the feudal bands of retainers, and the expropriation and partial eviction of the rural population." - 915
3. "Today, industrial supremacy brings with it commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture it is the reverse: commercial supremacy produces industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant role played by the colonial system at that time...It proclaimed the making of profit as the ultimate and the sole purpose of mankind." - 918
4. "The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is -- the national debt." - 919
5. "Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Herod-like slaughter of innocents." - 922

Chapter 32: The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

1. Sismondi, Nouveaux Principe d'economie politique, "We are in a situation which is entirely new for society...we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour" - 928, notes
2. "The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." - 929

Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonization

1. "Political economy confuses, on principle, two different kinds of private property, one of which rests on the labour of the producer himself, and the other on the exploitation of the labour of others." - 931
2. "Where the capitalist has behind him the power of the mother country, he tries to use force to clear out of the way the modes of production and appropriation which rest on the personal labour of the independent producer." - 931
3. "capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things." - 932
4. "So long, therefore, as the worker can accumulate for himself -- and this he can do so long as he remains in possession of his means of production -- capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production are impossible." - 933
5. "the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured. At home, in the mother country, the smug deceitfulness of the political economist can turn this relation of absolute dependence into a free contract between buyer and seller" - 935
6. "the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself, in other words, the expropriation of the worker." - 940

Capital: Volume 1, Chapters 26-30 by Karl Marx

Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

1. "This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology...from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property." - 873-4
2. "So-called primitive accumulation...is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as 'primitive' because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital." - 875

Chapter 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land

1. "We must never forget that  even the serf was not only the owner of the piece of land attached to his house, although admittedly he was merely a tribute-paying owner, but also a co-proprietor of the common land." - 877, notes
2. "A mass of 'free' and unattached proletarians was hurled onto the labour market by the dissolution of the bands of feudal retainers...the great feudal lords...created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal title as the lords themselves, and by usurpation of the common lands." - 878
3. "the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of newly hatched high finance, and of the large manufacturers, at that time dependent on protective duties." - 885
4. "The last great process of expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called 'clearing of estates', i.e. the sweeping of human beings off them." - 889
5. "The spoliation of the Church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians." - 895

Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament

1. "Edward VI: A statute of the first year of his reign, 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler." - 897
2. "Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless someone will take them into service for two years" - 897-8
3. "The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state and uses it to 'regulate' wages, i.e. to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation." - 899-900
4. "Workers' combinations are treated as heinous crimes from the fourteenth century until 1825, the year of the repeal of the laws against combinations. The spirit of the Statute of Labourers of 1349 and its offshoots shines out clearly in the fact that while the state certainly dictates a maximum of wages, it on no account fixes a minimum." - 901

Chapter 29: The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer

1. "This form [sharecropping] disappears quickly in England, and gives place to the form of the farmer properly so called, who valorizes his own capital by employing wage-labourers, and pays a part of the surplus product, in money or in kind, to the landlord as ground rent." - 905

Chapter 30: Impact of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. The Creation of a Home Market for Industrial Capital

1. "The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over the face of the countryside, are now crowded together in a few great labour-barracks" - 909
2. David Urquhart, Familiar Words as Affecting England and the English, "Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into the yearly clothing of a labourer's family by its own industry in the intervals of other work -- this makes no show; but bring it to market, send it to the factory, thence to the broker, thence to the dealer, and you will have great commercial operations, and nominal capital engaged to the amount of twenty times its value...The working class is thus amerced to support a wretched factory population, a parasitical shop-keeping class, and a fictitious commercial, monetary, and financial system." - 911, notes

Capital: Volume 1, Chapter 25 by Karl Marx

Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

- A growing demand for labour-power accompanies accumulation if the composition of capital remains the same

1. "I call the value-composition of capital ['the mass of the means of production'], in so far as it is determined by its technical composition [necessary labour for employment of the means of production] and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital." - 762
2. "The reproduction of labour-power which must incessantly be re-incorporated into capital as its means of valorization, which cannot get free of capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of the individual capitalists to who it sells itself, forms, in fact, a factor in the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat." - 763-4, emphasis mine
3. Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, "it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get...it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor;...To make the society happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities are supplied." - 765
4. "Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand." - 772

- A relative diminution of the variable part of capital occurs in the course of the further progress of accumulation and of the concentration accompanying it

1. accumulation increases as constant capital increases and variable capital decreases - 774
2. "Capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place. This is centralization proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration." - 777

- The progressive production of a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army

1. "With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent, the labour incorporated in it, does admittedly increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion...in fact it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore  a superfluous population." - 782
2. "The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing." - 783
3. "there must be the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres. The surplus population supplies these masses." - 785
4. "The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists" - 789

- Different forms of existence of the relative surplus population. The general law of capitalist accumulation

1. "The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army...The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth...This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation." - 798
2. Ortes, 18th century Venetian monk, "In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance each other:...the abundance of wealth with some people is always equal to the lack of wealth with others...The great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute deprivation of the essential necessities of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth." - 800

- Illustrations of the general law of capitalist accumulation

1. 1846: "the introduction of the free-trade millennium" - 802
2. "If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have." - 806
3. "The intimate connection because the pangs of hunger suffered by the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the economic laws are known." - 811
4. "Nomadic labour is used for various building and draining works, for brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, etc. A flying column of pestilence, it carries smallpox, typhus, cholera and scarlet fever into the places in whose neighborhood it pitches its camp." - 818
5. "In the construction of the cottages, only one point of view is of significance, the 'abstinence' of the capitalist from all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable." - 820
6. Dr. Julian Hunter, Public Health, Seventh Report, 1865, "The cost of the hind [i.e. agricultural labourer] is fixed at the lowest possible amount on which he can live...the supplies of wages and shelter are not calculated on the profit to be derived from him. He is a zero in farming calculations." - 834
7. "There are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary needs of cultivation, and too few for exceptional and temporary requirements." - 849
8. "Ireland is at present merely an agricultural district of England which happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle and industrial  and military recruits." - 860
9. "The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long duration of gluts of labour, are all symptoms of a relative surplus population" - 866

Capital: Volume 1, Chapters 23-24 by Karl Marx

Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction

1. "The economic character of capitalist becomes firmly fixed to a man only if his money constantly functions as capital." - 711
2. "surplus-value acquires the form of a revenue arising out of capital. If this revenue serves the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his consumption, and if it is consumed as periodically as it is gained, then, other things being equal, simple reproduction takes place." - 712
3. "When a person consumes the whole of his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his debts. And so it is with the capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent of his original capital, the value of his present capital represents nothing but the total amount of surplus-value appropriated by him without payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to exist." - 715
4. "The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant  to the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats." - 718
5. "The reproduction of the working class implies at the same time the transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another." - 719
6. "In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage is at once mediated through and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labour." - 723-4

Chapter 24: The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital

- Capitalist production on a progressively increasing scale. The inversion which converts the property laws of commodity production into laws of capitalist appropriation

1. "surplus-value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product, whose value it is, already comprises the material components of a new quantity of capital." - 727
2. "All capital needs to do is to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labour-powers of all ages, with the additional means of production comprised in the annual product" - 727
3. "the working class creates by the surplus labour of one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following year. And this is what is called creating  capital out of capital." - 729
4. "The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form;the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others." - 730

- The political economists' erroneous conception of reproduction on an increasing scale

1. "The classical economists are therefore quite right to maintain that the consumption of surplus product by productive, instead of unproductive, workers is a characteristic feature of the process of accumulation." - 736
2. "The movements of the individual capitals and personal revenues cross and intermingle, and become lost in a general alternation of positions, i.e. in the circulation of society's wealth." - 737

- Division of surplus-value into capital and revenue. The abstinence theory

1. "One part of the surplus-value is consumed by the capitalist as revenue, the other part is employed as capital, i.e. it is accumulated...the ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of accumulation." - 738
2. "the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation." - 739
3. "Accumulation is the conquest of the world of social wealth." - 739
4. "Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the same of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination." - 742

- The circumstances which, independently of the proportional division of surplus-value into capital and revenue, determine the extent of accumulation:

1. the degree of exploitation of labour-power
2. the productivity of labour
3. the growing difference in amount between capital employed and capital consumed
4. the magnitude of the capital advanced