Quotes from Peter Beinart

The top line is that hubris is a disease that comes from success.

I hope Barack Obama puts another woman on the Supreme Court. And this time, I hope it's a woman with kids.

Fears don't exist in isolation. They tend to rise and fall depending on what people think they can do about them.

For more than a half-century, anti-intellectualism has had a pretty good run in presidential politics. In fact, Republicans would never have gotten where they are without it.

for all of their accomplishments, Americans should not fall in love with their own virtue, and should not expect non-Americans to take that virtue on faith.

We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength," Truman declared, "that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.

Rustin foresaw a terrible chain reaction: black violence, inflamed by militant black leadership, producing a white backlash that would destroy liberalism just when it was poised to produce real change.

North and South Vietnam were meant to be reunified in national elections two years later, but Saigon—with Washington's support—reneged.

After China's fall to the Communists in 1949, which McCarthy and his allies deemed a stab in the back by a treasonous State Department, the Far Eastern Affairs division had been gutted, its most gifted analysts farmed out to other bureaus or hounded out of government altogether.

But exacerbating those differences was exactly what Nixon had in mind. Years later, former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman would write that the president took great pleasure "in constructing a political dilemma for the labor union leaders and the civil rights groups.

John Kenneth Galbraith, "on the shrewd notion that people who are insecure, hungry, and without hope are not ardent defenders of liberal institutions or discriminating in the political systems they embrace.