Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. […] Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. […] Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It’s way too complex. […] Expressing outrage over a president’s lack of honesty is like getting upset over a sniper’s lack of empathy: It’s an integral component of the vocation.

Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) (2013)

Eliminating the humanity of the masses can also be effected by converting them into scientific specimens. This was the enterprise undertaken in the 1930s by Mass Observation. Tom Harrisson, co-founder of the project, was a naturalist and anthropologist who had been a keen bird-watcher at Harrow. He and his team of middle-class observers based themselves in Bolton (‘Worktown’ in Mass-Observation code) and mingled with the natives, collecting data on local customs such as the cult of the aspidistra, football pools, dirty jokes, armpit hygiene and the proportion of males wearing bowler hats in pubs. Observers were instructed to use an impersonal notation when identifying human specimens. The formula ‘M 45 D’, for example, meant a man of about forty-five who looked or sounded unskilled working class (Category D).

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992)

[E. M.] Forster could not believe that a clerk might be genuinely thrilled by literature. (That prejudice is not dead among academics even today.) Aping his betters, [Leonard] Bast pathetically grinds away at his Ruskin and puts in time at concerts. They mean nothing to him, yet he is always hoping for a “sudden conversion, a belief … which is particularly attractive to a half-baked mind. … Of a heritage that may expand gradually he had no conception: he hoped to come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus.” Yet that is precisely how Culture came to autodidacts: their memoirs commonly climax with The Book That Made All The Difference. For the leisured classes, a gradually expanding intellect is certainly a preferable approach to learning, but the self-educated have only limited time to make up enormous gaps. They must move more quickly, they have hungrier minds, and they will passionately embrace any book that opens up a new intellectual landscape.

Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001)

They loved each other, in spite of the difference in their characters and tastes, as friends love each other who become close in early youth. But in spite of that, as often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other’s activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

“Free as a bird,” we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone — or at least by bread and circuses alone. “In the end,” says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s parable, “in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘make us your slaves, but feed us.’”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

In 1521, the Dominican inquisitor Silvestro Prierius published his De Strigimagarum, Demonumque Mirandis (On the Wonders of Witch-Magicians and Demons). According to him, demons were more than willing to commit acts against nature if it resulted in the sinning of witches. He referred to the confessions of female witches who admitted to having sex with demons with bifurcated penises (membro genitali bifurcato) such that they were penetrated both anally and vaginally simultaneously. With the Devil no longer restrained by ‘nature’, the emphasis on unorthodox sexual practices between witches and demons increased over the next century. Thus Henri Boguet wrote: ‘Satan couples with witches sometimes in the form of a black man, sometimes in that of some animal as a dog or a cat or a ram.’

Philip C. Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (2014)

I think of all the things that have been written about me – that I am an inhuman demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am good with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (1996)