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Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending any more time than they must around white people. This 'integration' image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them – and that's a lie! Or you can't tell the average white man that the Negro man's prime desire isn't to have a white woman – another lie! Like a black brother recently observed to me, 'Look, you ever smell one of them wet?'
— The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
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To know an author, personally, is too often but to destroy the illusion created by his works; if you withdraw the veil of your idol's sanctuary, and see him in his night-cap, you discover a querulous old crone, a sour pedant, a supercilious coxcomb, a servile tuft-hunter, a saucy snob, or at best, an ordinary mortal. Instead of the high-minded seeker after truth and abstract knowledge, with a nature too refined to bear the vulgarities of life, as we had imagined, we find him full of egotism and vanity, and eternally fretting and fuming about trifles. As a general rule, therefore, it is wise to avoid writers whose works amuse or delight you, for when you see them they will delight you no more.
— Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author (1878)
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The only real way to rid oneself of an established bureaucracy [...] is to simply kill them all, as Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome, or Genghis Khan in certain parts of the Middle East. Leave any significant number of functionaries alive, and within a few years, they will inevitably end up managing one’s kingdom.
— David Graeber parafraseert Max Weber in The Utopia of Rules (2015)
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