Quotes from Danielle S. Allen

Because of their impact on our memories, writers rule. They wield the instrument by which our world is organized.

The text has in it the wizardry of politics—the fact that it is possible for a multitudinous heap of people to build a shared life by doing things with words.

Because we have accepted the view that there is a trade-off between equality and liberty, we think we have to choose. Lately, we have come, as a people, to choose liberty.

Yet we can reasonably hope that our ideas, which wait up ahead, will make a clearing for desire.

As my father once quipped, the early history of this country is the story of James Madison talking to himself.

We might simply ask about all our encounters with others in our polity, "Would I treat a friend this way?" When we can answer "yes," we are on the way to developing a citizenship that is neither domination nor acquiescence.

Indeed, the art of democratic writing demands of its practitioners the aspiration to write to any and all, for any and all. It is a philanthropic art: it requires affection for humanity.

The Declaration does what it does, then—bravely giving birth to a new political entity—in four concrete steps: declaring reasons, presenting facts to witnesses, declaring independence, and making pledges. These are the parts that, taken together, assembled into a word machine of sorts—into a "piece of mechanism," to quote John Adams's opponent—make something happen.

The lesson of the Declaration's structure is that solidarity cannot be built without principle.