Benjamin E. Sasse Quotes
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Right now partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War. Why? It’s certainly not because our political discussions are more important. It’s because the local, human relationships that anchored political talk have shriveled up. Alienated from each other, and uprooted from places we can call home, we’re reduced to shrieking.
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Death is the hardest question, and in an age that gives short shrift to the transmission of wisdom from old to young, it is not surprising that death is the single most obvious fact of life from which we constantly insulate our kids. We have, to our detriment, created a cult of denial about our own mortality. Life needs to be lived and prioritized with the understanding that it is limited.
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We are necessarily within arm’s length of large questions about whether your kids on their deathbeds will be able to look back on lives oriented toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. This book is not outlining any answers to the grand questions of meaning, but we should acknowledge that adolescents and their parent-guides are inevitably wrestling with the fundamental: What makes a life worth living? From the moment human beings were able.
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To paraphrase Robin Williams’s compelling teacher character in Dead Poets Society: We don’t study poetry to get an “A,” to graduate, to get a job, to make money, to meet material needs. Rather, “we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering . . . these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love . . . these are what we stay alive for.
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The real number of the US' obligations, unfunded obligations that we're passing on to our future generates is more like $70 trillion to $75 trillion. The vast majority of that is health entitlements - Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid. There's also Social Security, interest on the debt. But fundamentally, health entitlements are the thing that will bankrupt our kids. We need to fix that for the long-term.
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Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.
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What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
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I don't understand what the president's Donald Trump position is on Russia. But I can tell you what my position is on Russia: Russia is a great danger to a lot of its neighbors, and Vladimir Putin has as one of his core objectives fracturing NATO, which is one of the greatest military alliances in the history of the world.
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America’s Founders understood literacy as a prerequisite for freedom and our form of self-government. Once we know how to read, what we read matters. So let’s build some reading lists of books you plan to wrestle with and be shaped by for the rest of your lifetime.
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Vladimir Putin is an enemy of the free press. The U.S. celebrates free press.
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Let's be clear: Has the U.S. ever made any mistakes? Of course.Is the U.S. at all like Vladimir Putin's regime? Not at all.
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I'm a conservative but not because I care very much about the marginal tax rates of the richest Americans, rather I'm a market-oriented localist because I believe in cultural pluralism and I believe in the First Amendment, in voluntarism over compulsion whenever possible, and in as much de-centralized decision-making as is conceivably feasible.
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I don't think we do a great job in America any more of distinguishing between campaigns and governance. We live in an environment that's all campaign all of the time and it's helpful, now that we've moved beyond a campaign and an election to get into a governance posture.
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What happens in Senate fight club stays in Senate fight club.
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If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions and awaking the curiosity in the soul of each citizen. National greatness will not be recovered via a mindless expansion of bureaucratized schooling. Seventy years ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote, 'Sure, we demand another grant of money, we postpone the school leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. We demand that teachers further slave conscientiously in and out of school hours. But to what end? I believe,' Sayers lamented, 'all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have no definable goal for each child to become a fully formed adult. We have lost the tools of learning, sacrificing them to the piecemeal, subject matter approach of bureaucratized schooling that finally compromises to produce passive rather than active emerging adults. But our kids are not commodities, they are plants. They require a protected environment, and care, and feeding, but most basically, an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight. What we need is the equipping of each child with those lost tools.
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Many of our television hosts are modern-day carnival barkers. We get dopamine, adrenalin, and oxytocin all at once. It's an adult video game. But instead of expertly separating us from our wallets, they're separating us from things much more valuable. Our time, our sense of perspective, and our judgment. And they are separating us from each other.
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Let’s hope that, over time, we’ll develop a bias, when we have an extra free hour, toward shoveling snow from the elderly neighbor lady’s sidewalk over streaming another Netflix sitcom.
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This is reality TV provocation, pure and simple. He loves it when the chyrons scream, Surely, surely, this is the thing that will take Trump down! He’s finally gone too far! He wants the twenty-four-hour coverage obsessing over him and his double-downs, partial pivots, and salacious provocations.
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There is no equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Vladimir Putin's defense of his cronyism. There's no moral equivalency there.
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At one level, happiness is an equation that has "needs met" as the numerator and "presumed total needs" as the denominator. One way to achieve temporary happiness is to invest more energy seeking to fill up the numerator. But another way, a more stable way, is to reflectively guard against the growth of one's denominator of needs, and to cultivate the habit of gratitude at the satisfaction of real and basic needs.
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There are two ways that you can go wrong in our long-term fight against jihadis. One would be to not acknowledge that terrorism and especially jihadi-motivated terrorism, comes from specific places in the world and is connected to specific ideologies. But another way to fall off a cliff and harm our long-term interests would be to imply that the U.S. is at war with Islam.
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A hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work rather than freedom from your work, even when work might hurt.
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So Vladimir Putin is a mess. He's committed all sort of murderous thuggery, and I am opposed to the way Putin conducts himself in world affairs, and I hope that the president also wants to show moral leadership about this issue.
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Algorithms in our search engines and social media platforms shape what we receive based on our previous preferences and choice, confirming our natural inclinations to read things that confirm our beliefs rather than challenge them.