Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in the world. If we fail to do so, we are not living up to our civic duty.
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.
Mr. Obama at the UN said that the large nations should not trample small ones in pursuit of what he called "territorial ambition". These are curious statements coming from the American president at this time.
The sheer number of legendary narratives and historically verifiable incidents invites us to revise assumptions about the origins of biological and chemical warfare and its moral and technological constraints.
Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.
The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.
The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.
Muslims have their own traditions. The important point to bear in mind is that the whole Muslim tradition is totally and unequivocally opposed to autocratic and oppressive government. This is very, very clear.
One of the chief reasons for the widespread fear of the Huns rested on their ability to travel very long distances in relatively short periods. This ability may well have been based on their use of horseshoes.
Whatever Lincoln's racial views, which are not totally modern and egalitarian in many ways, he believes blacks should have this natural right to improve their condition in life and slavery denies that to them.
The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
The members of such a society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty exposes the delinquent to divine correction.
It is absolutely true in war, were other things equal, that numbers, whether men, shells, bombs, etc., would be supreme. Yet it is also absolutely true that other things are never equal and can never be equal.
The children of politicians learn the allure and tricks of politics along with their alphabet. They inherit a network of useful contacts, and - if they're lucky - a name that confers instant voter recognition.
The trade agreement has become a rather distinct feature of the American labor movement. ... It is based on the idea that labor shall accept the capitalist system of production and make terms of peace with it.
You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.
You need to do some work even if you have the talent. So I just went the way that was easier, the way I knew what to do, but I have always had the pleasure of the eye. I've always enjoyed color. I'm a knitter.
Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser in 1969, would be envious and high-strung - a maintenance project of the first order.
In his State of the Union speech in January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declared America's commitment to Four Freedoms in the struggle against Nazi totalitarianism. Among them was the freedom from fear.
Be assured those will be thy worst enemies, not to whom thou hast done evil, but who have done evil to thee. And those will be thy best friends, not to whom thou hast done good, but who have done good to thee.
If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted.
Nullification is the Jeffersonian idea that the states of the American Union must judge the constitutionality of the acts of their agent, the federal government, since no impartial arbiter between them exists.
Netanyahu adheres to his old position: He doesn't want a Palestinian state, and he doesn't want to give up the settlements and the occupied territories. Pressure from abroad is the only way to change anything.
As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.
Few Americans realize it, but the United Nations is driving to take control over the Internet. You remember, the folks who want a worldwide income tax and who put Syria and Iran on their Human Rights Committee.
Letting the greens dictate your energy choices, whether it's halting the XL Pipeline or fracking in New York, isn't just bad economics. It can also leave your rivals and enemies controlling your energy destiny.
President Obama's achievements and failures must be evaluated by comparison to those chief executives who have come before him and not be measured against the prophetically moral voice of Martin Luther King Jr.
I think American life would be better without Twitter, and I think we'd have a better country if the president was not on Twitter. What people say in a bar or a pub doesn't necessarily merit being memorialised.
What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them.
I think some people who go into public life, if they go in needing the applause of thousands, they're never going to work out successfully in the end, because they don't know who they are apart from the crowds.
Instructed by history and reflection, Julian was persuaded that, if the diseases of the body may sometimes be cured by salutary violence, neither steel nor fire can eradicate the erroneous opinions of the mind.
Much of what Tea Party candidates claimed about the world and the global economy during the 2010 elections would have earned their adherents a well-deserved F in any freshman economics (or earth science) class.
I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.
Hitler was no inexorable product of a German 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere 'accident' in the course of German history.
For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.
Many Americans remain very interested in royal goings-on in general, and not just because of their soap-opera appeal. To a greater degree than any other polity, Britain functions as Americans' defining 'other.'
Whether religion is man-made is a question for philosophers or theologians. But the forms are man-made. They are a human response to something. As a historian of religions, I am interested in those expressions.
Whoever takes it upon himself to establish a commonwealth and prescribe laws must presuppose all men naturally bad, and that they will yield to their innate evil passions as often as they can do so with safety.
Poland in the 1990s saw a surge of unrestrained, American-style capitalism. With millions of Poles living in the U.S.A., the defeat of communism led many to aim for a lifestyle derivative of Chicago or Detroit.
Saud bin Abd al-Aziz was the moon-faced, shortsighted, bespectacled son of the old founder of Saudi Arabia, who'd always been his father's protege but had never quite lived up to everything that his father had.
I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on.
This bloody past suggests to us that enemies cease hostilities only when they are battered enough to acknowledge that there is no hope in victory - and thus that further resistance means only useless sacrifice.
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
I find writing a book a slow, intricate process, a kind of obstacle course punctuated with great rewards. But research is always thrilling, and I tend to incorporate newfound material up to the very last minute.
The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.
The Archivist of the United States essentially works for the American people across partisan lines and not, regardless of which Administration nominates the person, for a particular President or political party.
If the conflict is about the size of Israel, then long and difficult negotiations can eventually resolve the problem. But if the conflict is about the existence of Israel, then serious negotiation is impossible.