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Truman laughed. “I was just thinking of that old woman’s face when I started reading her the Bill of Rights,” he said. “It was quite a sight….But you know something? It’s not a bad idea to read those ten amendments every once in a while. Not enough people do, and that’s one of the reasons we’re in the trouble we’re in.”
Jon Meacham • The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
Seven years later, at the height of his public influence, he repeated the value he placed on those committed to the life of the mind. In an October 1963 speech at Amherst College, he would say, “The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispens
... See moreIn one of the most haunting passages of his masterwork, Democracy in America, he says that democracies are at risk of a completely new form of oppression for which there is no precedent in the past. It will happen, he says, when people exist solely in and for themselves, leaving the pursuit of the common good to the government. This is what life wo
... See moreJonathan Sacks • Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (Covenant & Conversation Book 8)
Molenaar recognized that the fatal flaw of averagarianism was its paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality.
Todd Rose • The End of Average
I hold it to be sufficiently demonstrated that universal suffrage is by no means a guarantee of the wisdom of the popular choice, and that, whatever its advantages may be, this is not one of them.
Alexis de Tocqueville • Democracy in America, Volume I and II (Optimized for Kindle)
... See moreNeoliberals’ political analysis was even worse than their economics, with perhaps even graver consequences. Friedman and his acolytes failed to understand an essential feature of freedom: that there are two kinds, positive and negative; freedom to do and freedom from harm. “Free markets” alone fail to provide economic stability or security against
workfutures • Doing Too Little
In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and poor”—“those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”—and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would com
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
... See moreThe aspect of Scott Buchanan’s life to which this memoir relates began, for me at least, with a college lecture he gave in October of 1944.
The lecture was a flight of high speculative fancy in which he tried to imagine the features of a Republic of Learning joined with a political republic.
If man is a political animal, his virtues compromised and