Liberal Quotes - page 38
Much of the time, the question goes unasked in prosperous liberal democracies like Britain or the United States, because most of us see political equality as exhausted by "one person, one vote” and dig no deeper; we know that one person, one vote coexists with the better-off and better-organized buying influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and use of the mass media, but we find ourselves puzzled to balance a belief that everyone has the right to use his or her resources to influence government-which is certainly one form of political equality-with our sense that excessive inequality of political resources undermines democracy.
Alan Ryan
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
[T]he attention span for political affairs in a democracy is a limited one. The fundamental genius of a liberal democracy lies in how it restrains government and permits its citizens to pursue their own interests without unnecessary molestation. So when we must address political or national issues-whether it's "On to Richmond” or "54-40 or Fight”-we want problems addressed swiftly, so that we can turn back to our private concerns. When that doesn't happen, we turn back to the private concerns anyway, and the problems and their solutions are left to fester or find their own solutions.
Allen C. Guelzo
To say that I did not support the candidacy of Mr. Trump is the understatement of the year. I fiercely opposed it... I have criticized as unnecessary his policy on pausing immigration from certain countries, and I have criticized as weak to the point of meaningless his executive order on religious freedom. Indeed, I characterized it as a betrayal of his promise to reverse Obama era anti-religious-liberty policies. Donald Trump is not, and usually doesn't pretend to be, a man of strict or high principles... As a pragmatist, he doesn't have a governing philosophy - he's neither a conservative nor a liberal. On one day he'll give a speech to some evangelical pastors that makes him sound like a religious conservative, but the next day he'll lavishly praise Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is waging an all-out war on those who stand up for traditional moral values in Canada.
Robert P. George
Lincoln is, both culturally and in terms of his economic thinking, firmly and immovably located in the center of what we can call liberal democratic thought in the 19th century. He is very much market oriented, with tremendous confidence in the power of a capitalist society to transform for the better, and he believes in opening the possibilities of that society to as many as possible. To him, that's what's coterminous with liberty.
Allen C. Guelzo
Reconstruction aspired to restore the foundations of freedom to a wayward South and it expected to triumph as effortlessly as 19th-century liberal notions of progress had promised. Instead, the same Romantic feudalism that had created the old Southern order reasserted its hegemony, and postwar Southern aristocrats appealed to a set of cultural and racial biases which safely defused the importance of property, and sharply restricted access to it. This might have been averted had the victorious Union been willing to pour the resources into Reconstruction it had devoted to winning the war. But Reconstruction became a symbol of how quickly political fatigue afflicts liberal democracies. Moreover, understanding Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution which was strangled in its cradle by vengeful cotton nabobs offers some larger parallels to the optimistic era that prevailed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Islamic state terrorism.
Allen C. Guelzo
[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about-it's about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.
Allen C. Guelzo
![[I]n a liberal democracy, sovereignty lies in the people at large; and our governing structures exist to implement that will. (Allen C. Guelzo)](https://static.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images/39/allen-c-guelzo-democracy-522839.jpg)
Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln's best antislavery intensinos.
Allen C. Guelzo
The closest thing to criticism of the Blue House our government has issued in recent months has been the statement that inter-Korean relations mustn't get ahead of denuclearization. Clearly the relations are not in themselves problematic from America's perspective. This in turn implies approval of the many steps Moon has already undertaken to undermine the ROK's claim to exclusive legitimacy and its commitment to liberal democratic values.
Brian Reynolds Myers
A major problem is the characterization of the government in Seoul as liberal, as if it were no less committed to constitutional values and opposed to totalitarianism than the West German social democrats were in the Cold War. This makes Westerners think, "North Korea can't take over the South without a war, but it knows it can't win one, therefore it must now be arming only to protect itself."
Brian Reynolds Myers
