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The Road to Serfdom

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F.A. Hayek

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“In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.”

Decline Of The West
Book:Drawn and Quartered
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“In the first place the process of disintegration was a slow one, for the whole tempo of life was slow and what might take decades in our own time took centuries then. It is only because we can look back from the vantage point of a much later age that we can see the inexorable pattern which events are forming, so that we long to cry to these dead people down the corridor of the ages, warning them to make a stand before it is too late, hearing no answering echo, 'Physician, heal thyself!' They suffered from the fatal myopia of contemporaries. It was the affairs of the moment that occupied them; for them it was the danger of the moment that must be averted and they did not recognize that each compromise and each defeat was a link in the chain dragging them over the abyss.”

RaceHistoryFall Of RomeDecline Of The WestCollapse Of Civilisation
Author:Eileen Power
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“Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and slimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its unappetizing tone-slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so: and, if we are not asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Author:Herman Hesse
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“All conversation had stopped. Following the guests’ collective gazes, Cam saw something—a lizard?—wriggling and slithering its way past sauceboats and salt cellars. Without hesitation he reached out and captured the small creature, cupping it in closed hands. The lizard squirmed furiously in the space between his closed palms. “I’ve got it,” he said mildly. The vicar’s wife half fainted, slumping back in her chair with a low moan. “Don’t hurt him!” Beatrix Hathaway called out anxiously. “He’s a family pet!” The assembled guests glanced from Cam’s closed hands to the Hathaway girl’s apologetic face. “A pet?… What a relief,” Lady Westcliff said calmly, staring down the length of the table at her husband’s blank countenance. “I thought it was some new English delicacy we were serving.” A swift wash of color darkened Westcliff’s face, and he looked away from her with fierce concentration. To anyone who knew him well, it was obvious he was struggling not to laugh.”

HahaLillian And MarcusBeatrixSpot The LizardEnglish Delicacy
Book:Mine Till Midnight
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“Poppy took a deep, appreciative breath. “How bracing,” she said. “I wonder what makes the country air smell so different?” “It could be the pig farm we just passed,” Leo muttered. Beatrix, who had been reading from a pamphlet describing the south of England, said cheerfully, “Hampshire is known for its exceptional pigs. They’re fed on acorns and beechnut mast from the forest, and it makes the bacon quite lovely. And there’s an annual sausage competition!” He gave her a sour look. “Splendid. I certainly hope we haven’t missed it.” Win, who had been reading from a thick tome about Hampshire and its environs, volunteered, “The history of Ramsay House is impressive.” “Our house is in a history book?” Beatrix asked in delight. “It’s only a small paragraph,” Win said from behind the book, “but yes, Ramsay House is mentioned. Of course, it’s nothing compared to our neighbor, the Earl of Westcliff, whose estate features one of the finest country homes in England. It dwarfs ours by comparison. And the earl’s family has been in residence for nearly five hundred years.” “He must be awfully old, then,” Poppy commented, straight-faced. Beatrix snickered. “Go on, Win.” “‘Ramsay House,’” Win read aloud, “‘stands in a small park populated with stately oaks and beeches, coverts of bracken, and surrounds of deer-cropped turf. Originally an Elizabethan manor house completed in 1594, the building boasts of many long galleries representative of the period. Alterations and additions to the house have resulted in the grafting of a Jacobean ballroom and a Georgian wing.’” “We have a ballroom!” Poppy exclaimed. “We have deer!” Beatrix said gleefully. Leo settled deeper into his corner. “God, I hope we have a privy.”

HistoryPigsPoppySiblingsDeerLeoHathawaysBeatrixPrivy
Book:Mine Till Midnight
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