Political Works

"We may profit by their experience, without paying the price which it cost them."

"But the safety of the people of America against dangers from foreign force, depends not only on their forbearing to give just causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to invite hostility or insult; for it need not be observed, that there are pretended as well as just causes of war."

"The pride of states as well as men, naturally disposes them to justify all their actions, and opposes their acknowledging, correcting or repairing their errors and offences."

"Nothing is more certain then the indispensable necessity of government; and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights, in order to vest it with requisite powers."

"I affect not reserves, which I do not feel."

"The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America."

"The Indians, with no advantages of this kind, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated."

"Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous."

"To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. ... Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species."

"It will probably be asked, 'Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?' Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

"To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act. The bill reported by the revisors does not itself contain this proposition; but an amendment containing it was prepared, to be offered to the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up, and further directing, that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of houshold and of the handicraft arts, feeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independant people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength."

"All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. [...] As little will it avail us that they are chosen by ourselves. An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by others."

"Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong."

"It should be our endeavour to cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation, even of that which has injured us most, when we shall have carried our point against her. Our interest will be to throw open the doors of commerce, and to knock off all its shackles, giving perfect freedom to all persons for the vent of whatever they may chuse to bring into our ports, and asking the same in theirs. Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is their interest to go to war."

"Generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.... Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

"And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other."

"There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him."

"For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!"

"I doubt whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three years imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the trinity. But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection we receive in return for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."

"Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perforin the office of a censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves. But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments? Our sister states of Pennsylvania and New York, however, have long subsisted without any establishment at all."

"Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons."

"The Newtonian principle of gravitation is now more firmly established, on the basis of reason, than it would be were the government to step in, and to make it an article of necessary faith. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them."

"The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice cannot be relied on, reject it then, and be the stigma on him. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them. Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free enquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free enquiry been indulged, at the aera of the reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away. If it be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged. Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food."

"I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as Nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people."

"Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled, too, in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Diogenes, Phaedon, Terence, and Phædrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction."

"Theodore H. White tells a remarkable story about Goldwater's chief speechwriter, Karl Hess. Chief speechwriters of losing campaigns usually find a safe berth somewhere in the party machine, but not so Hess. First, he applied for positions with conservative senators and congressmen—the very politicians who had been cheering him on a few months before. Unwanted, he lowered his sights dramatically. Could he perhaps work the elevators in the Senate or the House? Still no luck. The apostle of the free market was reduced to the ranks of the unemployed. He enrolled in a night-school course in welding and eventually found a job working the night shift in a machine shop."

"[Barry] Goldwater cheerfully broke all the basic rules of politics. … One fan came up with a soft drink called "Gold Water—The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste." The candidate, with characteristic political sensitivity, promptly spat it out. "This tastes like piss!" he spluttered. "I wouldn't drink it with gin.""

"Another caped crusader was Ayn Rand, a Russian émigré who wrote a clutch of novels celebrating economic individualism. … But to many contemporaries, the cult that surrounded her seemed a bit weird. She envisaged a hyperminimalist state with no taxation and no traditions of any kind, least of all Christianity. She preached her philosophy of "objectivism" in a thick Russian accent, urged people to have as many orgasms as possible and dressed in a flowing black cape tied closed by a gold brooch in the shape of a dollar sign. … Rand believed firmly that people had a duty to smoke (because it represented man's taming of fire): the publishing party for Atlas Shrugged featured custom-made cigarettes embossed with little gold-leaf dollar signs. At her memorial service in 1982 a six-foot-high dollar sign was placed next to her open coffin and the room was filled with the strains of the song "It's a Long Way to Tipperary.""

"An Irish Catholic who grew up on a small farm in the Midwest and attended Marquette, a Catholic university in Milwaukee, where he liked to box, [Joseph] McCarthy personified populist resentment against the liberal elite. … "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys," he told a crowd of reporters, "you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker." No wonder Prescott Bush found it necessary to give him a lecture about manners."

"George H. W. has always had a reputation of being "somewhat to the center of center". Many Texans mistook his East Coast politeness for wimpishness, dismissing him as a "clean-fingernails Republican" or, worse, "the sort of man who steps out of the shower to take a piss," as one of our colleagues was once told."

"A firm believer that "manners makyth man," [Prescott Bush] once took Joseph McCarthy to one side and lectured him for more than an hour on his boorish behaviour. … When McCarthy came to Connecticut to address a Republican meeting, Prescott recoiled at the rowdy crowd: "I never saw such a wild bunch of monkeys in any meeting I ever attended." At home he was such a stickler for standards that friends called him the "Ten Commandments Man.""

"Throughout this book, we have tried to avoid using any of the jibes that are commonplace on both sides of the debate; after all, there is no shortage of people we can quote doing this. … If you have come to the book hoping to be told that George Bush is a moronic, oil-obsessed cowboy or that the French are "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," then we hope that you paid for it before reaching this sentence."

"If Bush has divided opinion at home, he has united it abroad—pretty much all against him."

"These days, American politics is a sport played between the center Right against the Right. From an international perspective, Democrats are now LINOs—Liberals in Name Only."

"Americans who describe themselves as "conservatives" nevertheless disagree on almost all the most fundamental questions of life. Paleoconservatives lament the passing of tradition. Libertarians celebrate capitalism's creative energy. Religious conservatives want to put faith at the heart of politics. Business conservatives command an economic system where, in Karl Marx's phrase, "all that is holy is profaned." The Straussians at the Weekly Standard are philosophical elitists who believe that the masses need to be steered by an educated intelligentsia. The antitax crusaders who march behind Grover Norquist are populists who believe that pointy-headed intellectuals need to be given a good ducking. "What is the difference between conservatives and cannibals?" goes one Democratic joke. "Cannibals eat only their enemies.""

"Of course, non-Americans admire many things about America; and, of course, Jacques Chirac is less of an ideological opposite than Joseph Stalin. But the end of the Cold War was not the end of history. The defeat of the Soviet Union has given both sides of the Atlantic a chance to study their erstwhile allies in a new light—and has prompted talk of differences as much as similarities. It is rather like two relative strangers who fight off muggers and then go off for a celebratory meal only to discover that they don't have as much in common as they thought."

"Why have the Republicans squandered their reputation for fiscal prudence? One excuse on the Right is that the Republicans want to build up big deficits in order to put a long-term constraint on the growth of government: any future Democratic administrations would have nothing to spend. Even if this were true, would this be sensible policy? It is rather like saying that, because your brother-in-law drinks too much, you're going to drink all the alcohol in the house before he visits for the Memorial Day weekend."

"Starting in 2010, the baby-boom generation will begin to retire—and to place huge burdens on Social Security and Medicare. The numbers here are staggering. One 2003 study from the American Enterprise Institute put the total unfunded liabilities at $44 trillion (four times America's GDP); Medicare alone could eat up $20 trillion. Rather than prepare for this challenge, the Bush administration has run away from it; indeed, in 2003, it massively extended Medicare, subsidizing drugs for retired people, without any fundamental reforms. The same AEI paper claims that waiting till 2008 to try to fix the problem of entitlements will increase the total liability to $54 trillion."

"On December 5, 2002, the Senate threw a party for Strom Thurmond's hundredth (and last) birthday. … The event was naturally taken up with comments on Thurmond's extraordinary life force—and his legendary eye for the ladies. Ol' Strom married his second wife, a twenty-two-year-old former Miss South Carolina, when he was sixty-six. The happy couple went on to have four children. He remained flirtatious well into his nineties, despite his gruesome-looking hair transplant. "When he dies," a fellow senator once remarked, "they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid.""

"Those Europeans who think that the neoconservatives tricked their way into the heart of conservative America have got things topsy-turvy. The reason why the neoconservatives proved so influential was not because they deceived their fellow conservatives but because they succeeded in translating some of conservative America's deepest passions into a theory of foreign policy. That suggests that the neoconservatives were both less and more influential than Europeans imagine. They were less influential because they were simply putting into words what the rest of the Right Nation felt in its heart. But they were more influential because they helped to shape America's response to a cataclysmic event. The neoconservative movement will resound for many years to come."

"Nowadays the idea that America has a neoconservative foreign policy is commonplace. Yet until September 11, the neoconservatives were junior members of the Bush team. … They were intellectuals and professionals—the sort of people who earned postgraduate degrees from venerable universities, forged careers in think tanks, academia and intellectual magazines and spent quite a lot of time disagreeing with one another. They were not natural comrades of a president who judged people by the content of their hearts rather than the quality of their minds."

"Anyone who worries about George W. Bush's adventurous fiscal strategy of cutting taxes while increasing spending might look at what happened when he did the same thing in Texas. In the mid-1990s, he delivered both a big tax cut and plenty more spending, especially on education. By 2003, a fractious Texas legislature was trying to plug a $10 billion hole in the budget. Bush has taken his penchant for big political gambles to Washington. It is hard to think of any other president, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, who was so happy to take risks—from ripping up established arms-control treaties to invading Iraq. All Bush's gambles have had elements of calculation, but the general approach has been a brusque "Who dares, wins.""

"Whether they are sitting in the plush Driskill Hotel in Austin or some god-awful motel in Waco, Texans firmly maintain that they have the biggest-and-best-of-everything. This bragging does not always make other people love Texas, even in the West. (When, back in the early 1980s, one of us broke down in a car with Texas plates in southern Colorado, nobody stopped to help for what seemed like an eternity; the man who eventually did explained: "You should have had a sign saying you weren't from Texas.")"

"Reformism had mutated into radicalism, with something of an anti-American bent. Four-fifths of the delegates in 1972 had never attended a Democratic convention before. The place was full of postadolescents (two Arizona delegates had not even turned eighteen when they were selected). The entire event was chaos; the nominees did not manage to make their speeches until the small hours of the morning, robbing the party of its television audience. Many of the most important meetings still took place in smoke-filled rooms, but this time the smoke smelled rather different."

"Their [Carter's critics'] biggest complaint against the book — a legitimate one — is the word “apartheid” in the title, with its false echo of the racist policies of the old South Africa. But overstatement hardly adds up to anti-Semitism.--Ethan Bronner"

"Carter's picture feels like yesterday’s story, especially since Israel’s departures from southern Lebanon and Gaza have not stopped anti-Israel violence from those areas.... This book has something of a Rip van Winkle feel to it, as if little had changed since Carter diagnosed the problem in the 1970s.--Ethan Bronner"

"Jimmy Carter...a partisan of the Palestinians...[offers a] notably benign view of Hamas...[creates] sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed...and blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew.--Jeffrey Goldberg"

"Israeli action in the Territories corrupts the Zionist dream, and is no better than apartheid.... I have not been a leftist for years, because I do not believe the Arabs would agree to share this country with us, and I believe in the Jews' right to a home and a state in our historic homeland. Yet what we have been doing in the territories borders on the criminal. When President Carter, who was never a friend of Israel, writes that what we are doing in the territories is similar to apartheid, everyone cries out in protest. Yet he wasn't far off from reality: our behavior is worse than that prevalent in South Africa at the time. It's unpleasant to say this, but this is the way it is.--Yoram Kanyuk"

"Americans owe a debt to former President Jimmy Carter for speaking long hidden but vital truths. His book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid breaks the taboo barring criticism in the United States of Israel's discriminatory treatment of Palestinians. Our government's tacit acceptance of Israel's unfair policies causes global hostility against us.--George Bisharat"

"After four decades of Israeli occupation, the infrastructure and superstructure of apartheid have been put in place. Outside the never-never land of mainstream American Jewry and U.S. media[,] this reality is barely disputed.--Norman Finkelstein"