Rauch, Jonathan
We learn wisdom from our friends but cunning from our enemies.
Revelations 6:7, 8
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
Rickover, Hyman.
If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
Ah the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,
doesn't it fill our hands differently with its return:
heavier by the weight of where it has been.
Riven, The Game
To dwell in the past is to die in the present.
Roberts, Paul Craig & Lawrence Stratton: The New Color Line, Regnery (1995)
Brown [vs. Board of Education of Topeka] gave up on goodwill and substituted judicial coercion for democratic outcomes. The Civil Rights Act gave up on freedom of conscience, preferring instead regulatory coercion. Both events took decision-making power away from the people on the grounds that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing if permitted to rule themselves.
Brown and the 1964 act did more than attack segregation and racial discrimination. They also attacked the presumption of goodwill and freedom of conscience, which are the foundations of civil society. Brown was based on the assumption that representative democracy cannot produce moral outcomes.
In liberal society, ends cannot be defined independently of the means of achieving them.
Because the democratic process is built on persuasion rather than coercion, democracies favor free expression and a free press.
Swept up by a cause, Frankfurter and Elman had forgotten that the road to tyranny is paved with noble ends. In pursuit of a just cause, they shattered the bedrock of jurisprudence - the impartiality of judges, subordinated the law to sociology, and replaced the democratic process and its appeal to goodwill with the rule of judges. The end, they thought, justified the means, and they led the Court in a new direction at odds with the American political tradition.
Despicable means cannnot produce good outcomes.
The transformation of a government of elites into a democracy rested upon faith in the ability of ordinary people to recognize right from wrong. Liberals were confident that within each human heart there existed a moral gyroscope. Injustice would diminish, they believed, as freedom of conscience replaced self-serving dogmas.
Freedom of conscience became a bedrock value of liberalism.
... we don't look to lawyers for morality.
Liberalism is predicated on goodwill. Without goodwill, people of differing incomes, intelligence, ethnic origin, gender and personality cannot live together in democracy and share in shaping the law that governs them all. In the absence of goodwill, there is nothing but the coercive power of government to mediate differences. ... Jefferson's trust in the common man and Madison's trust in majority rule are illusions if goodwill is an illusion.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
Roosevelt, Theodore.
Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die...
Rowling, J.K.. Harry Potter
Russell, Bertrand
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
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