Anthony Lewis Quotes
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Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment.
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The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.
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We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.
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We grew up even a lot from last week. Even with all the dropped balls and fumbled, we never stopped believing in ourselves.
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Attacking the indecency of life in much of the Southern Hemisphere is no longer a matter of grace, of charity, of patronizing kindness. It is a matter of intense self-interest.
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East and West, most societies have come to believe that competition will produce more prosperity for more people than a planned economy. I share that belief.
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With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.
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We have learned by now, or should have, that the best-intended designers of aid programs can make ghastly mistakes in their sophisticated plans.
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Is it 'left' to insist that presidents and CIA directors adhere to the law? I don't think so. I think it's American.
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Without the foundation of law, this vast country could never have survived as one, could never have absorbed streams of immigrants from myriad cultures. With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.
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The Pentagon Papers case stands today as a barrier to silence by official edict.
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A final argument for broad freedom of expression is its effect on the character of individuals in a society. Citizens in a free society must have courage — the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts.
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Americans, we passionately believe, are a humane people. We showed that in restoring wounded economies abroad after World War II, even those of our enemies, Germany and Japan.
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There are values of humanity, culture, beauty, community that may require deviations from the cold logic of market theory.
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Even a competent lawyer may not be able to mount an adequate defense against the state, with all its resources, if he has next to nothing for investigation and effectively works for starvation wages.
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I was covering the Supreme Court when it decided Gideon v. Wainright, and the case has always had special meaning for me.
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Freedom under law is hard work. If rulers cannot be trusted with arbitrary power, it is up to citizens to raise their voices at injustice.
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Over many years, the United States has worked to persuade and compel governments around the world to abide by the rules. By spurning our own rules, we put that effort at risk.
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Americans who visit Tuscany or Umbria love the landscape: the silvery olive groves, the fields of sunflowers, the vineyards, the stone houses and barns.
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Faith in reason was the foundation stone of the United States.
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The only way to security for Israel and a humane life for Palestinians in their own land is political. No matter where the fault for past negotiating failures lies, there is no other path.
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Five more times in the succeeding pages of his penciled petition Gideon spoke of the right to counsel. To try a poor man for a felony without giving him a lawyer, he said, was to deprive him of the due process of law.
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We defended him as hard as we could; but he made a lot of tough shots in the paint against us.