Journalists From The United States

"The formula for defeating Trump in November [2024] is simple enough: Unite the Democrats, and split the Republicans."

"In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship."

"Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes power. That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships, the opposition is always weak and divided. That's what makes dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of persecution."

"The vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction."

"[W]ho will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice Department?"

"I think people are absolutely dreaming if they think that when the United States pulls out of Europe that Europe will just stay this calm, placid place. I think that we will throw Europe back into the same problem. And you don’t have to talk about Nazis or Hitler or any of that to say the norm in Europe is competition, conflict. And if we think that that’s over, I think that history tells us otherwise. And then again, so do we wind up – can we allow Europe in a way to fail as a liberal system without it affecting us? Again given the level of our trade, given the level of our communication, our involvement with them."

"No one sitting in Germany in 1945 would have said, “Oh don’t worry, it’s just natural to become a democracy.”"

"The thing that I find striking, in addition to Americans not being aware always how they are bumping into others and intruding upon others, Americans also - because they have this view - because we have this view that we don't care, that we're really just about minding our own business, then events occur and we surprise ourselves and we do care."

"Americans - one of the founders, Gouverneur Morris, described Americans as the first-born children of the commercial age. Because when American was founded, the ideas of Adam Smith, the ideas of John Locke were dominant. And American was founded on the ethos that individuals should go out and prosper and acquire. And Americans have been trying to acquire ever since, and this does affect American foreign policy. I wouldn't focus particularly on the middle class because I think it's true of all Americans of all classes. And it has shaped American policy."

"[T]o say that the United States is bad because it behaves like a group of humans behave I think is a mistake. And I think we have to have more realistic basis of comparison. And this is part of the problem with the myth that we create of ourselves. We create an idealized image of ourselves in the past that we are never living up to in the present, and I think that's an evasion really from facing reality."

"American nationalism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism. No one's an American just because they were born in America or had American parents. American nationalism is built around this idea - and it happened to be, certainly at the time, an extremely revolutionary idea that only Americans believed in, by the way, at the time. Which was the principle of universal rights..."

"[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union -- in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?"

"When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail."

"And now, in the final irony, the fact that the US military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem", allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous."

"When President Dwight Eisenhower undermined and humiliated Britain and France at Suez in 1956, it was only the most blatant of many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its already weakening global influence."

"Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity."

"The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error."

"A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law."

"With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular—not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people."

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."

"[L]ove, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other."

"[W]hether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals."

"Ideals are imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible."

"The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no further than to say that he is so well satisfied with the analogy that he is through with searching any further."

"It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. A State is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and dis-establish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern State claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and democrats."

"[T]he modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere."

"There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, no priests, princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. ... The prison door is wide open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun."

"We have come to see that Huxley was right when he said that “a man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.” The evidences of these greater difficulties lie all about us: in the brave and brilliant atheists who have defied the Methodist God, and have become very nervous; in the women who have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of fathers, husbands, and homes, and with the intermittent but expensive help of a psychoanalyst, are now enduring liberty as interior decorators; in the young men and women who are world-weary at twenty-two; in the multitudes who drug themselves with pleasure; in the crowds enfranchised by the blood of heroes who cannot be persuaded to take an interest in their destiny; in the millions, at last free to think without fear of priest or policeman, who have made the moving pictures and the popular newspapers what they are."

"The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolate persons."

"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."

"[T]here is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other."

"[T]he totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike."

"Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed."

"[N]ews and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide."

"The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes."

"Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself."

"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies."

"[T]he newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct."

"There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil."

"[T]he present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism."

"In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant."

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."

"Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision."

"Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is not followed by a cooperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk."

"[T]here is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions."

"Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character."

"Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others."

"Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people."

"[A]ll achievement should be measured in human happiness."

"You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers."