"Our religious heritage, as we have said, requires of us a belief in the dignity and worth of the common man. Our political institutions have been formed to protect this belief and to give it chance for expression. If we neglect those institutions or misunderstand them, if we neglect our religious heritage or forget what it demands of us, we expose ourselves to the danger that there may appear in our midst men willing to seize absolute power and to bring back that ancient curse, the sovereign state. There can be no Christianity in such a state, no honor for the common man. Our fathers knew this in theory, which is why they labored to build a constitutional government and not an irresponsible "state." We have learned the lesson pragmatically, watching with astonished eyes while all the theories of our fathers are proved by the most ruthless of teachers. This is why we must labor not only to destroy the Axis but to remove the sovereign state, the Moloch state, from the face of the earth."
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Pulitzer Prize winnersHistorians from the United StatesColumbia University alumniJournalists from New York (state)Princeton University alumni
Original Language: English
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Sources
A Time For Greatness (1944), pp. 82-83
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Agar
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Herbert Agar
Herbert Sebastian Agar (29 September 1897 – 24 November 1980) was an American journalist and historian, and an editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal.
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