"Dickens was tormented, he had huge extremes of emotion.
"But like foreign exchange reserves, some countries go to huge extremes".
Even the mild challenge of Thomas Piketty, with his heretical talk of public rather than private interest being essential to a functioning democracy, is revolutionary in a world which buys the conservative idea that the elixir of "growth" simply has to mean these huge extremes in income distribution.
But modern capitalism has also resulted in huge extremes of wealth, significant debt at both individual and government levels, creation of financial instruments that have no social value at all and the unsustainable use of scarce physical and natural resources.
Last autumn, Al Gore gave Global Action Plan access to his huge slideshow depicting extreme weather events around the world.
The match, the longest semifinal in Wimbledon history, was a marvel of huge strokes of extreme precision at exorbitant speeds.
The status quo is unacceptable: our already fragile economy cannot afford more of those huge losses from extreme events.
It is the work of an enormously ambitious young man, albeit one suffering from syphilis: the scale is huge, the contrasts extreme, the melodic material superabundant.
And yet despite the lofty claims of Clinton to have dragged the formerly unemployable into the middle classes, once they took effect there was a "huge spike in extreme poverty, defined as the number of households making under $2 a day", according to the Washington Post.
China faces three paradoxes in trying to alleviate poverty: first, the country is on the whole getting richer, becoming one of the largest economies in the world, yet huge pockets of extreme poverty exist in the country.
