Benjamin E. Sasse Quotes
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Five decades later, it’s clear that the problem isn’t about race—it is nearly universal. The works of Charles Murray, Robert Putnam, and J. D. Vance show that these tragic developments are not unique to any geographic or ethnic community. The share of white births occurring outside marriage is now roughly three in ten, which is higher than the “emergency” black rate in the 1960s. And although the teen pregnancy rate is down, the Urban Institute’s “Moynihan Report Revisited” pegs the overall share of black births now occurring outside marriage at more than seven in ten. Fourth, we have unhelpfully come to so identify our obligations to teenagers with the institution of secondary schooling that we have lost the collective memory of folks who came of age without schooling as the defining.
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It is not only the content of a book that changes you but the shared community with those who have read it, discussed it, argued about it.
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In the midst of extraordinary prosperity, we’re also living through a crisis. Our communities are collapsing, and people are feeling more isolated, adrift, and purposeless than ever before.
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When one half of the nation demonizes the other half, tendrils of resentment reach out and strangle whatever charitable impulses remain in us.
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We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.
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We would never have been crazy enough, insulated enough, bubble-wrapped enough, to think that it was impossible to sleep without it—especially at seventy-two degrees.
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Our goal is for our kids to be intentional about everything they do --- to reject passivity and mindless consumption and to embrace an ethos of action, of productivity, of meaningful work, of genuinely lifelong learning.
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As Putnam demonstrates, poorer, less-educated parents tend to believe that their primary task is getting their children to obey, as opposed to better-educated parents, who emphasize helping their children understand why they ought to obey a given rule. Reading, reasoning, and problem-solving with their parents help children develop the higher-order skills that make them better equipped to face the challenges of a fluid, complex world.
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Living only in the present isn’t freedom. Living only in the present isn’t even human if you think about it. Humans, unlike any other animal on the planet, remember the past. We understand our nature. And we try to build on both of them. We are an aspirational species; we look to the future.
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And the media plays into his hand, every single time. By April 1, 2016, with a month still to go in the Republican primaries, Donald Trump had received the equivalent of $2 billion in free television coverage. All sixteen of his GOP opponents, by comparison, had received $1.2 billion combined. By the day of the November general election, Trump had earned just under $5 billion in free media—$1.75 billion more than Hillary Clinton.
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Could we perhaps be rearing a generation that might not be tough enough to be good Americans? For a good American needs to be tough.
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It's not natural to have to suffer when we work. We're made to be productive, and yet the world we live in, there's a whole bunch of suffering. And what they need to understand as 10-year-olds, so that when they're 15 and slightly less protected, and when they're 20 and they're moving into a truly semi-independent state, they need to have experienced that memory of persevering and having gotten through hardship.
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I think I'm one of five people in the Senate who's never been a politician before. And now that I am a politician, what I find weird about it is that I respect myself less.
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We're not at war with all Muslims, we're at war with a subset of Islam that believes in killing in the name of religion, as jihadis do.