Jim Baggott
Jim Baggott

The last century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world’s leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport man kind to the very pinnacle of wonder and to the very depths of despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed theories

that would deny us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend the nature of physical reality. It was also a century in which they built weapons with the capacity utterly to destroy this reality.

Sarah Bakewell
Sarah Bakewell

The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.

Richard Scott Bakker
Richard Scott Bakker

Every monumental work of the State is measured by cubits. Every cubit is measured by the length of the Aspect-Emperor’s arm. And the Aspect-Emperor’s arm, they say, stands beyond measure. But I say the Aspect-Emperor’s arm is measured by the length of a cubit, and that all cubits are measured by the works of the State. Not even the All stands beyond measure, for it is more than what lies

within it, and more” is a kind of measure. Even the God has His cubits.

Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine
Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine

This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion, this world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other… This may seem strange. What can there be in common between

socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found.

Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine
Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine

No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside

legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being — they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.

Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine
Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine

We … have humanity divided into an indefinite number of foreign states, all hostile and threatened by each other. There is no common right, no social contract of any kind between them; otherwise they would cease to be independent states and become the federated members of one great state. But unless this great state were to embrace all of humanity, it would be confronted with other great states,

each federated within, each maintaining the same posture of inevitable hostility.

Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine
Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine

All people and all men are filled with a kind of premonition, and everyone whose vital organs are not paralyzed faces with shuddering expectation the approaching future which will utter the redeeming word.

Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin

The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by

the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky— flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind? That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant

mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror.

Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin

The atmosphere in [the last twenty] years has been, in many parts of the country, poisoned. I do not wish to say anything here about where the faults may lie. But I do want to say that I realise, as you do, that a great deal of the propaganda which has been done during the last twenty years—the propaganda of a kind that teaches class hatred—has in many places done its evil and its poisonous

work…the work that has been done in that direction cannot be undone in a moment. And it will mean the utmost goodwill, the utmost force of example to bring about, to any great extent, something better and something on which we may erect a permanent and stable building.

Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin

There are kind critics of the British race who say that we know how to combine three things—religion, patriotism and profit—better than any other nation. There are other and more complimentary explanations of our success in North America. The real fact lies in this: we transported our own stock into the new world…We had the inestimable advantage of being longer than any other country in

Europe a free country, and our people pushed cross the seas in their little boats to plant the seed of freedom which had grown and flourished at home. In those people and their spirit of adventure you have the origins of Canada and of Manitoba.