Tea Parties ARE Mad

     What they are seeking and hoping for is a return to the past, and that past, however pleasant it was for some, did not seem very respectable to me. It may even be said that people took pleasure in a rather shameful state of affairs. Humanity seemed to me rather to deserve slavery; and if only the slavery that threatened us, and still threatens us, had been a submission to nobler values, I am not sure that I might not have gone so far as to welcome it. Liberty seems to me deserved solely by the man who could utilize it for an end other than himself or who would demand of himself some exemplary development. The stagnation of the greatest possible number of representatives of a second-rate humanity in a second-rate everyday happiness is not an "ideal" to which I can lose my heart. We can and must aim toward something better.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume IV: 1939-1949, 16 January, 1941, pp. 58-59.

     It is independently of our will that ideas take shape in us and develop. There exists for them a sort of "struggle for life," of survival of the fittest, and some of them die of exhaustion. The sturdiest are those that feed not on abstraction, but on life; they are also the ones that are hardest to formulate.
     The history of an idea would be interesting to write. It may also be that an idea dies. Yes, it would be a fine subject: the birth, life, and death of an idea. If only I could count on enough time to write it.... (sic)
— André Gide, Ibid., 1942, p. 106.

     There are those who would like to ameliorate men and there are those who hold that that cannot be done without first ameliorating the conditions of their life. But it soon appears that one cannot be divorced from the other, and you don't know where to begin. Some days humanity strikes me as so miserable that the happiness of a few seems impious.
— André Gide, Ibid., pp. 125-126.

     One reads in a note to Sainte-Beuve's Port-Royal (Book III, Chapter vii): "A keen student of mankind has pointed out that sometimes quoting one's own remark as coming from another shows it off to advantage and succeeds better." A device of which he often made use himself, of which he doubtless makes use even here when he speaks of "a keen student of mankind," who is probably none other than he.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1943, p. 178.

Just consider what rosebushes become in bad soil and without sun and attention. You accuse people; I accuse only their poverty and those who caused it and maintain it for their own profit. — It is essential to know whether one is for the greater number or for the choice few. Their interests seem opposed. But are they really? ... This is not merely a question of humanity, of humanitarianism; art and culture are at stake.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 207.