Quotes from Thomas E. Ricks

How long shall thy Madness outbrave our justice?

Let the disloyal then withdraw, let them separate themselves from the loyal. . . . get you gone to your unholy and abominable campaign.

break his hold on power, as…we had come to expect," the first president Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote in their 1998 joint memoir, A World Transformed. Third, the U.S. military didn't

Prudent, considerate, careful, determined, honest, and inflexible:

to study a situation, evaluate its facts, decide which ones were meaningful, develop a course of action in response to work toward a desired outcome, and verbalize the orders that needed to be issued. Those are the basic steps in critical thinking

One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

We need to appreciate the Enlightenment's broader, richer notion of happiness and make it again about finding one's place in the world, enjoying what we have and what we see in it, and appreciating the beauty of the Earth during our short time on it.

Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, "To be enlightened was to be filled with hope."54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was "superstition, intolerance, tyranny."55

But as far as I can tell, there does not exist a study of what our first four presidents learned, where they learned it, who they learned it from, and what they did with that knowledge. That is what I endeavor to explore in this work.

So, he continued, if the government controls the established church, then the church ultimately must answer to the people. Thus, he concludes, the people "have the power to governe the Church, to see her do her duty, & to correct her, to redress, reform, establish, & c.

relatively powerless—the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the

Adams was paying attention to such thinking. He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew's reputation.

Rollin's works were not just records of events, but also instruction manuals about how to live, and especially how to acquire virtue.

Jefferson would remain devoted to Epicurean thought for the remainder of his life. He summarized that belief system thusly: Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice90

Populism tends to look good from a distance, but close up it can be frightening.

The words of truth are simple, and justice needs no subtle interpretations, for it has a fitness in itself; but the words of injustice, being rotten in themselves, require clever treatment.

Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice90

As the sociologist Ann Swidler has observed, "common sense"is really just deeply embedded culture: "the set of assumptions so unselfconscious as to seem a natural, transparent undeniable part of the structure of the world.

I think his success was largely due to his great human qualities: his sense of humor, his common sense and his essential honesty and integrity. He inspired love and unfailing loyalty; he had a magic touch when dealing with conflicting issues or clashes of personalities; and he knew how to find a solution along the lines of compromise, without surrendering a principle. He is, in fact, a great democrat.

We should drop the bizarre American fiction that corporations are people, enjoying all the rights of citizens, including unfettered campaign donations as a form of free speech. Indeed, corporations possess greater rights than do people, as they cannot be jailed or executed, while citizens can and do suffer those fates. As the legal historian Zephyr Teachout has observed, the founders would have considered corporate campaign spending the essence of political corruption.

When there is no coherent strategy, tactics, no matter how flashily executed, become meaningless.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

George Lansbury, an aging Labour Party official, backed up the Conservative PM by telling the House, "I hear all this denunciation of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini. I have met both of them, and can only say that they are very much like any other politician or diplomat one meets.