Fiery Enough

The young idealist entered public service in the very year in which there came to crest a movement—Progressivism—that was based, to an extent greater than perhaps any other nationally successful American political movement, on an idealistic belief in man's capacity to better himself through the democratic process.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books, 1975. 

Because this intelligence, which is fiery enough to start a revolution, seems determined to bury passions in ashes, to die one day with the simplicity of mind of a peasant who has never left behind the sickle blade with which he has cut grass for seventy years out of eighty.

Sebastian, Mihail. For Two Thousand Years. Penguin Modern Classics, 2016.

I read these two sentences on the same day and my first instinct was to reach out for my copy of Бесы.