Quotes from Jean Bethke Elshtain

Just punishment, which observes restraints, is different from revenge, which knows no limits.

The problem with becoming a public intellectual is that over time you grow more and more public but less and less intellectual.

We must never lose the language of justice, for it reminds us of what is at stake and of the importance of keeping justice itself alive in how we fight.

There is no allusion to marriage or family in the Constitution. It is barely mentioned in the Federalist Papers or elsewhere in the ratification debates. The reason why the founders "ignored" the family was that it was not an issue for them. It was not a social problem. On the contrary, the family was the accepted substratum of society. It

In a time of dislocation, the Manichean view- we, the "good versus them, the "bad" -is, though comfortable, also false and dangerous. False, as I myself know remembering a little girl who wanted a gun and a brother who did not[...]. Dangerous because this simplistic view depends on rigid notions of what men and women are in relation to war and of war itself as an absolute contrast to peace.

Marriage does not serve primarily to accommodate or to mitigate social tragedy of this sort. Its principal function is to prevent or limit the occurrence of such tragedies in the first place.

Seen from this perspective, the sexual revolution is to the family what Communism is to the market. Both entail statist assaults on core institutions of civil society, leading to human misery that the state is not equipped to put right. In both cases, what results from the erosion of a core institution is a citizenry ill-equipped to be self-governing; accordingly, state power inevitably grows.

MARRIAGE IS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN INSTITUTION. Virtually every known human society has some form of marriage. 1 While the norms of marriage in different cultures vary considerably, marriage always has something to do with creating a public (not private) sexual union between a man and woman so that socially valued children have both a mother and a father, and so that society has the next generation it needs.