Imprimis | Articles
Interview with Jerry Leeman: Today we bring you a story about a handful of fishermen rallying against a billion-dollar green industrial project, shady foreign corporations, and our own federal and state government. All are conspiring to generate a cash cow for...
By Greg Yates The criminal case People v Gosselin took place in a little red house structure known as the “Town of Highland Justice Court” located in Sullivan County, New York. This little red structure is also known as the Barryville Town Hall, where court is...
* SPECIAL SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL ISSUE *The revolutionary and founding generations did their heroic part in bequeathing to us this legacy of freedom. So abundant is this gift that to live up to it is the most fulfilling thing we can do.
If we continue as we have been, the prospect of our children living shorter, less healthy lives than we do is a real possibility.
It is absurd to believe that the Fourteenth Amendment confers the boon of American citizenship on the children of illegal aliens.
Diplomacy is an art and is best defined by its outcomes rather than by its processes. The most consequential outcome by far is the constraint of the power of one’s adversaries.
Public programs fraud on the scale we see today in Minnesota—and to a lesser degree (so far at least) in other states—indicates a leadership class that has either forgotten or no longer takes seriously the idea that public office is a public trust.
The video draws service members into a political dispute, sowing discord, which is especially dangerous during periods of political tension.
A proper celebration of the Declaration will be helpful in all our troubles. It will be helpful to the young men and women who are lost today by helping them to rediscover nature and reason.
With their dehumanizing rhetoric and soft-on-crime policies, progressives create permission structures that excuse crime and violence, remove accountability, and blur the distinction between right and wrong. As if that weren’t enough, in New York they have also created powerful disincentives for good citizens to protect themselves or others from crime.
Charlie, you see, has suffered enough. He’s gone to the Lord. He deserves his reward.
The Russia collusion hoax was anchored to two central claims: first, that Trump was a compromised agent of Russia, and second, that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. The first claim was completely debunked after years of investigation. It is on the second and far more plausible claim—which was just as key to the hoax—that the newly released documents shed new light. And the revelations are shocking.
Millions of Americans are asking for a reexamination of our culture and society with an eye to restoring ancient decency and looking to the good of past generations.
The EU brings benefits, but it does so by destroying national sovereignty. It seems to turn the countries it dominates into whimpering, simpering, dysfunctional shadows of the proud nations they once were.
When Alexander Hamilton became the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, he immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco. The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been laid only on imports.
The following is adapted from a lecture prepared for delivery at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Kansas City, Missouri. Defending America and America’s friends and allies is expensive. If you add up the price tag—not even including secret programs or the cost of U.S. intelligence—our current defense expenses stand at $875 billion per
We must take the steps necessary to protect our defense investments. If we don’t, we may one day find ourselves engaged in a conflict with an enemy who is much better prepared for the fight than we are.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 29, 2025, at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Somers, Connecticut. Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared that he and his supporters were “the party of common sense.” In his Inaugural Address on January 20, Trump returned to this theme. With
Trump has repeatedly said that his common-sense revolution would usher in a “new golden age.” In the context of unleashing the economy and technological innovation, we can understand this to mean literal gold. But a large part of our new golden age will be aggregated under the rubric of normality. The return of common sense is also the return of the normal. What would that look like in the realm of culture?
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at a Hillsdale College luncheon in Anchorage, Alaska, on January 22, 2025. Just hours after his inauguration on January 20, President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the events of January 6, 2021. He commuted the sentences of fourteen additional people whose
Defenders of the official narrative accuse those who ask such questions of being conspiracists. But until those questions are answered, our understanding of January 6—no matter our political leanings—will be incomplete.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on September 29, 2024, during a conference on “Christianity in America.” One of the most beautiful things written during the American Founding period is George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington had visited Newport in August of that
The following is adapted from remarks delivered on November 19, 2024, at a Hillsdale College reception in San Diego, California. The recent election is the product of a decades-long struggle in American politics that has intensified since 2016. The election produced a victory for the man who caused the intensification, Donald Trump. He caused it
It may become possible to restore constitutional government in place of the administrative or bureaucratic state that has almost overtaken it. That is the issue that matters the most. The worst evils stem from it. The strongest resistance guards its entrenchment.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered in Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College on October 23, 2024, as part of the Drummond Lectures in Christ Chapel series. The top-down, elitist brand of politics that has dominated the United States since the end of the Cold War—under Republican and Democratic administrations alike—has failed. Yes, we
American conservatism exists to serve the people and the nation through the Constitution. This includes defending them against enemies foreign and domestic. And the fact is, elite institutions have become the people’s and the nation’s enemies. They are openly waging cultural war on those they ostensibly serve. They cannot be negotiated with or accommodated. They must be defunded, disbanded, and disempowered. The rewards for doing so—for putting American families first again—will be greater than we can know.
*The First Issue of Imprimis—Updated for Today* Editor’s Note: The first issue of Imprimis, published in May 1972, featured an article titled “The Dangers of Price Controls” by Henry Hazlitt. The Federal Reserve back then was printing large amounts of money to fund massive government spending on Great Society programs launched during the presidency of
What the government ought to be doing to counter inflation and get prices low is to free and encourage the producers—not to put them in a straitjacket by fixing prices.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 23, 2024, at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Somers, Connecticut. In March of this year, Bryan Malinowski, the executive director of the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, Arkansas, was killed by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol
How do we regain control over the ATF and other federal law enforcement agencies? Not through congressional hearings that provide a forum for political showboating and partisan posturing and go nowhere. The American people must demand that Congress either reassert its authority over these agencies or else abolish them and start anew.
The conflict today is not simply a normal policy argument between conservatives and progressives. It is over the future of the historic American nation, both its creed and its culture.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on April 18, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bellevue, Washington. In the past two years, two competing groups of conservatives—National Conservatives or NatCons and Freedom Conservatives or FreeCons—have issued competing manifestos. These manifestos reflect a divergent understanding of the progressive challenge to the
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on April 17, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bellevue, Washington. On April 6 this year, as the University of South Carolina and University of Iowa women’s basketball teams were preparing to play in the NCAA National Championship game, two press conferences were held
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on March 11, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on February 15, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida. The most consequential falsehood in American public policy today is the idea that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racial discrimination. If a cancer research lab, for
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 22, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration began counting the number of foreign nationals “apprehended” or “encountered” by what
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on November 1, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The Covid cover-up began in China. But in a way we make too big a deal of
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner on June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise from Istanbul to Athens. Hillsdale is often called a conservative college, and in an important sense it is, although it is not a label we regard as fundamental. The word “conservative”
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 3, 2023, during a conference on “U.S. Intelligence: History and Controversies.” We need the CIA, but we also need to recognize the uncomfortable reality that the CIA is not performing at the level we require. It is not keeping us safe. It
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner on June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise from Istanbul to Athens. The word “imperialism” comes from the Latin word imperium. It refers to a nation or a state implanting its rule on other states, treating them as subordinates
2023 Commencement Address The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 13, 2023, at Hillsdale College’s 171st Commencement Ceremony. Congratulations to the Hillsdale College Class of 2023. It is a thrill to be here at Hillsdale, which I have heard about for a long time. Last night I had a wonderful tour of
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on April 24, 2023, in Irving, Texas. In a recent survey of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries—i.e., all the rich countries in the world—about 60 percent of respondents said they believe that global warming will likely or very
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on February 22, 2023, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Indian Wells, California. Just about everybody on Wall Street knows, despite what you read in the financial press, that the Biden administration’s economic policies are driving our economy into a recessionary ditch. In a recent
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on March 5, 2023, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Big Pharma.” I developed a serious cardiac arrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, seven years ago. It worsened over the past summer and early fall, and over the past six weeks I’ve had several ambulance
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on February 7, 2023. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our
By Christopher Flannery Host, The American Story The following is adapted from an online presentation recorded at Hillsdale College on October 18, 2022. On the mezzanine floor of the Parker House Hotel in Boston hangs a mirror, still today. In the late fall of 1867,...
The following is adapted from remarks delivered on November 3, 2022, at a Hillsdale College reception in Santa Clara, California. If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 20, 2022, sponsored by the student group Praxis. On April 15, 2020—a full month after President Trump’s fateful news conference that greenlighted lockdowns to be enacted by the states for “15 Days to Flatten the Curve”—the President had a revealing White House
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on November 7, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “The Great Reset.” Is the Great Reset a conspiracy theory imagining a vast left-wing plot to establish a totalitarian one-world government? No. Despite the fact that some people may have spun conspiracy
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on February 28, 2022, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. For several years prior to 2020, violent crime in America’s major cities was on the decline. But
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on February 24, 2022, in Naples, Florida. When I was researching my biography of economist Thomas Sowell, I kept coming across Sowell’s own descriptions of scholars he admired, and I was often struck by how well those descriptions applied to
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022, during a two-week teaching residency at Hillsdale as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism. Why do I say that we need to lay siege to our institutions? Because of what has happened to our institutions since the 1960s. The
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 20, 2022, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on September 16, 2022, in Washington, D.C., at Hillsdale College’s Constitution Day Celebration. The seal of the U.S. Department of Justice reads, “Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur”—“Who prosecutes for Lady Justice.” Depictions of Lady Justice are as familiar as they are instructive: she stands blindfolded while holding
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 4, 2022, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on the topic of Russia. According to what we hear from the White House and from the television networks, the issues at stake in the Ukraine War are simple. They concern the evil
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Critical American Elections.” Sixteen years ago, in 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform issued a report that proposed a uniform system of requiring a photo ID in order to vote
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College reception in Overland Park, Kansas, on November 18, 2021. Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening?
Inflation is an economic concept that refers to the overall increase in prices of goods and services in an economy. It is usually measured as an annual percentage change. Inflation can be caused by various factors, including excess money supply, high government spending, and production bottlenecks.
This is what distinguishes his scholarship: courage. Sowell wasn’t afraid. It’s the sort of thing that ought to be commonplace among scholars and intellectuals—and journalists, for that matter—but clearly it is not.
Murders nationwide in 2020 rose a stunning 29.4 percent over the previous year, the largest annual increase since the FBI began tracking that data in the 1960s. The number of murders in Chicago climbed even more sharply, rising 55 percent. It was as if a switch had been flipped. At least ten major U.S. cities hit new murder highs in 2021, but Chicago led the way with 797, the city’s highest number in 25 years.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on November 7, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “The Great Reset.”
We are hearing more and more subsequently about root causes—especially from Vice President Harris, who President Biden charged with developing a “Root Causes Strategy.” But what we are hearing is bunk. The fact is that when the U.S. opens its borders—which is what it amounts to when we return to a catch and release policy—illegal immigrants flock to the U.S. That’s the root cause of the crisis on our southern border.
This is a movement that would turn our children against themselves because its advocates know there is no greater harm—no quicker way to bring America to its knees—than by driving our children to do themselves irreversible damage.
No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power. To borrow a phrase from the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, it is fast achieving “cultural hegemony” in America’s public institutions. More and more, it is driving the vast machinery of the state and society. If we want to succeed in opposing it, we must address it politically at every level.
All indications are that those in power have no intention of allowing Americans to live normally—which for Americans means to live freely—again. And sadly, just as in Galileo’s time, the root of our problem lies in “the experts” and vested academic interests.
We should respond to the COVID virus rationally: protect the vulnerable, treat the people who get infected compassionately, develop a vaccine. And while doing these things we should bring back the civilization that we had so that the cure does not end up being worse than the disease.
History will record that America’s China policy from the 1970s until recently was very costly because it involved a great deal of self-deception about the nature of the Chinese regime and the men who were running it.
America is a shining example of sports’ transformative power. The games we play, the games at the center of our social behavior, combine with our founding principles to enhance the American experience. America’s enemies know this, which is why the culture war has moved to our arenas and stadiums.
The coronavirus lockdowns demonstrated our leaders’ ignorance of economic interdependence. After the riots, that ignorance has been shown to run far deeper. It is an ignorance about government’s most fundamental obligation: to safeguard life, liberty, and property. It is an ignorance about human nature and human striving.
The reason for a space force is simple: space is the strategic high ground from which all future wars will be fought. If we do not master space, our nation will become indefensible.
Ancient authors from Plato to Tacitus have suggested that affluence combined with leisure creates a laxity that leads to the kind of societal and institutional disintegration we are currently seeing. Another major ingredient is the failure of our education system to offer disinterested instruction, following from the post-1960s takeover by the Left of our colleges and universities.
A company’s stock will likely decline when it becomes known that the company is providing surveillance cameras for concentration camps or producing ICBMs targeting American cities. You would think that demanding this kind of disclosure would be unobjectionable—but then why is it so hard? Is it because China would be offended?
While the hallowed doctrine of stare decisis—the rule that judges are bound to respect precedent—certainly applies to the lower courts, Supreme Court justices owe fidelity to the Constitution alone, and if their predecessors have construed it erroneously, today’s justices must say so and overturn their decisions.
It is a consistent characteristic of this country that we have always sought to rise above or move beyond the conditions that are given to us at birth—something not true of every people. To be an American is to believe that the status we are born into is never the final word. We have a spirit of striving, a spirit of hope that goes back to our very beginnings.
The measure of our fundamental law is not whether it actualizes the general will—that was the point of the French Revolution, not the American. The measure of our Constitution is whether it is effective at encouraging just, stable, and free government—government that protects the rights of its citizens.
To understand a political scandal fully, one must take into account all of the interests of those involved. The problem is that these interests are rarely revealed—which is precisely why it is so tempting for partisans, particularly if they are at a political disadvantage, to resort to scandal to attack their opponents.
Economists since Adam Smith have taught us that in a competitive economy, the pursuit of private interests leads to the best possible outcome for everybody. But notice the qualifier: for this arrangement to work, there must be competition.
It seems, at times, that we live in an age when too many disregard the wisdom of the past. But here at Hillsdale you’ve been grounded in the teachings and traditions that are our greatest inheritance as Americans—the same teachings and traditions that are the surest foundation of a boundless American future.
China’s share of high tech exports has risen from about five percent in 1999 to about 25 percent at present. America’s has plummeted from about 20 percent to about seven percent. What this means in practical terms is that America can’t build a military aircraft without Chinese chips.
A great disservice has been done to the dedicated men and women of the FBI by Comey and his seventh floor henchmen. A grand jury probe is long overdue.
Academic institutions should be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life.
We must emphasize a nationalism based on both a commitment to the ideals of the American Founding and a shared love of our national history and culture.
Douglass argued for identifying with America—with the nation founded on “human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.”
Last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility.
In the weeks following the Citizens United ruling, the Left settled on a new strategy—it would threaten, harass, and intimidate its opponents.
The key to producing good intelligence lies in asking the right question, rather than in just poring over what’s been randomly collected.
Given its record of abuse in recent years, the Senate needs to repair its rules regarding the filibuster.
The best expression of this aspect of Thanksgiving comes from Benjamin Franklin, who called it a day “of public Felicity.”
The appointment of the next Supreme Court justice could be the most legally significant event for our country in a generation.
Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person.
Congress, despite its complaints about executive and judicial poaching, has been giving up constitutional powers voluntarily and proactively for decades.
As a rule, people who make good choices succeed, and people who make bad choices fail.
American conservatism is about conserving something—principles that are timeless because they are true—to be renewed and applied in our time.
Dishonest passivity and dependence combined with harmful activity becomes a pattern of life, and not just among drug addicts.
It is little wonder that there is talk of another Sagebrush Rebellion like that embraced by Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s.
Just as ObamaCare was the wrong prescription for health care, Dodd-Frank was based on a faulty diagnosis of the financial crisis.
As seen in the recent government shutdown and the showdown over the debt limit, the federal budget stands at the heart of American politics.
When we talk about football, we usually talk about our favorite teams and the games they play.
Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted portrayals of life.
Simply put, the American free market system is the greatest engine for prosperity and opportunity that the world has ever seen.
Margaret Thatcher is one of the great prime ministers in British history, and one of the longest serving, at least in continuous times.
Our secular establishment wants to reduce the autonomy of religious institutions and limit the influence of faith in the public square.
The best case for lower taxes is the moral case—and as Coolidge well understood, a moral tax policy demands tough budgeting.
The political freedom that makes a liberal arts education possible requires an ongoing and active defense of liberty.
Not to know what happened before you were born, that is to be always a boy, to be forever a child.
Most conservatives do not believe that a radical diminution of American power and influence would be good for us or for the world.
There is a growing awareness among Americans that religious freedom in our country has come under sustained pressures.
Federal student financial assistance programs are costly, inefficient, byzantine, and fail to serve their desired objectives.
Monuments, because they are public art forms, must be legible. And this requires a great degree of convention.
Across the nation we have governors and mayors trying to solve their public employee problems with varying degrees of seriousness.
What made Americans who we are is a historically unprecedented level of freedom and responsibility.
The defining feature of Ronald Reagan was his moral courage.
I think it is no exaggeration to say that one of the most clear-sighted, deeply learned, and steadily courageous of all of the servants of human freedom in our age is the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus.
Europeans today prefer leisure to performance, security to risk-taking, paternalism to free markets, collectivism and group entitlements to individualism.
It is time to push home the point that all American workers should be granted the full freedom of association in the area of union membership.
Our founders well understood that our liberty could not be preserved without frequently referring back to first principles.
The standard kilogram—a cylinder of platinum and iridium that is maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures—has been losing mass.
We are often reminded that the Korean War ended not with a formal peace treaty, but rather with an armistice. And indeed, that is an irrefutable fact.
What’s unique about Dawn Treader is that, structurally, you have this series of adventures as the ship sails from island to island
If the Great Depression teaches anything, it is that property rights must be established or else we will not have strong recovery.
In 1853, a professor and preacher named Ransom Dunn set off to raise funds for Hillsdale College, an institution of higher learning in Michigan.
I think we can safely say that America has departed from the constitutional principle of limited government that made us great and prosperous.
What is left, really, to being an American if we are all simply part of some abstract humanity?
It is one of the wonders of the political world that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
78 million people are going to stop working, stop paying taxes, stop paying into retirement programs, and start drawing benefits.
What has happened to GM is essentially bankruptcy by other means, and that is an extraordinary event in the political and economic history of our country.
Why are conservatives today arguing that we need to “get beyond Reagan,“ by which they mean that we need to abandon the ideas that Reagan stood for?
So the first thing to understand about Iran is that it is a country where lies and deception are a way of life.
The key to our becoming self-sufficient—and doing our part for our fellow Americans—is to develop further our state’s vast natural resource wealth.
Citizenship does not exist by nature; it is created by law, and the identification of citizens has always been considered an aspect of sovereignty.
The lesson of her whole life is: If you don’t try, you won’t succeed; but if you do try, you cannot imagine how successful you might be.
The fact of the matter is that we in the United States have just lived through the greatest period of prosperity in human history.
The sun has been our prime source of energy throughout human history, but energy is also generated in the earth itself.
From the heroes of the past we learn, and what they teach, by the example of their lives and words, has the special quality of truth by personal example.
In 1936, Roosevelt’s was also the popularity of a leader who had invented a new way to reward the constituencies that he needed to win.
I believe that sound science and good sense will prevail in the face of irrational and scientifically baseless climate fears.
The United States represents a beacon of hope to a new generation of Chinese who live in a Leninist regime supervising a semi-capitalist society.
Maintaining the College’s independence, then, is part and parcel of fulfilling Hillsdale’s mission by expounding the ideas that are necessary to preserve.
We are entitled to call ourselves socialist, if by that we mean that we are devoted to the early socialist goal of the well-being of all members of society.
Cultural restoration, Russell Kirk said, begins at home. And in today’s media saturated culture, I dare to say that it may also begin at the movie theater.
When teaching law students the significance of private property, we tell them that each owner of such property has something called a “bundle of rights.” The first of these rights is the right to use the property. The second is the right to alienate the property. The third and greatest is the right to exclude people from the property. With this in mind, let me pose a question: Can the government force a property owner to sell his property? James Madison argued that the government could do so as long as it paid the owner a fair market value and as long
I was in Baghdad, staying at the famous al Rashid Hotel. From that hotel, CNN broadcast images of the first Gulf War to the entire world.
As used in Arabic at that time, liberty was not a political but a legal term: You were free if you were not a slave.
The question is, how do you make money in a free market? You only make money if you can provide someone with something he or she is willing to pay for.
Femininity was the feminine mystique that had been imposed on women by men in order to subordinate women, even enslave them.
We must remember that our kids want us to be involved in their lives. They don’t really want or need another gadget or the hottest video game.
It may best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger
We see violence, terror and fear nearly every day, thanks to 24-hour news coverage. We see poverty and hunger in too many places around the globe.
A long life in journalism and around Washington, D.C., has taught me not just that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas have lasting consequence
Joseph Stalin once said, “The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.”
The most significant meaning of the 2004 election is that America has renounced the worst lessons of the post-Vietnam era.
Government, by going outside its proper province, has caused many, if not most, of the problems that vex us.
Of course it was not Reagan’s words alone that caused the Wall to come down in Berlin or the Evil Empire that built it to crumble. But the words were vital.
In today’s world of mass media and instant communication, movies still have an enormous effect on our culture and an even larger effect on younger Americans
The unique power of the Lincoln theme is suggested by the fact that it has occasioned more titles in the world’s libraries than any other name.
A very interesting fact emerged: of the 19 suicide terrorists on September 11, 15 were subjects of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
What we’re seeing around the world at the moment is a silent revolution, reflected in a change in how people view government accountability.
This revolution in the legal system has begun to transform American politics. The part of this that gets the most press today is the litigation lobby
If we are to keep America and its economy on the right track, we must find a way to return to our citizens more control over their lives.
America has less freedom of speech today than it has ever had in its history. Yet it is widely believed that it has more.
Professional salespersons are graduates who sell goods and services to other professionals. They represent the most prestigious companies in the world.
Not one of you needs me to tell you, though I will remind you anyway, that your Hillsdale education is a gift for which you must be ever grateful.
The second quality of Washington’s character I want to mention is the ability to let go and knowing when to let go.
The law of custom imposes upon me the duty of saying a few things appropriate to the occasion. That duty I shall aim to discharge to the best of my ability
The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong.
The school kept a stack of Imprimis issues. I picked one up and noticed the motto under the title: “Because ideas have consequences.”
We live in a totally new world. We live in a unipolar world of a sort that has not existed in at least 1500 years.
We are not given other tools than study and learning, prayer and devotion, argument and action, with which to defend our liberty.
To think about Islam, we find ourselves first of all engaged in the question of what Islam is.
“In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the rule of law.”
There is a time to lay down arms, and there is a time to take them up, and that we are now in a time to take them up is self-evident.
The United States is well on its way to winning the war against terrorism because, under President Bush, it has espoused three clear principles.
Freedom is not maintained by military might. History is strewn with the wreckage of great civilizations that fell for lack of morality.
According to the scientific facts as we know them today, there is no environmental reason we should not continue using fossil fuels.
The terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers despise what America stands for: freedom, religious toleration and individual liberty.
For some reason, American journalists in recent decades have assailed the Constitution with startling vigor.
As we gathered at the railing with the Chaplain, two of the ship’s crew brought out the Marine’s body and covered it with an American flag.
When we got to Bastogne, we found the Cemetery, and I found Punchy. All I can find words to say right now is that it was a traumatic moment.
A wounded Japanese plane crashed atop the forward turret of one of our destroyers, engulfing the bridge as well as the turret in flames.
Today at this hour President Bush is attending church services in Washington, D.C. He has asked the news media to announce this fact.
Reforms intended to improve the quality of American education fall into three categories.
The moment a politician decides that it’s more important to be re-elected than to stand his ground, he becomes weak and ineffective.
The damage done by regulation is so vast, it’s often hard to see.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the most meaningful explication of modesty comes from the Bible.
Science is exciting partly because single discoveries can change the course of history.
A President who is not focused on foreign policy and national security is not doing his job as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
May we now recapture our love for our constitutional system, the structure that has allowed this great Republic to grow and prosper.
Prosecutorial discretion is—or should be—the process that ensures our jails are full of drug dealers, not people who remove the tags from their mattresses.
You can be assured that the propagation of the statist, anti-freedom position is being funded largely with union money.
The Hillsdale College faculty is dedicated to fostering the intellectual growth of students by presenting a curriculum that lights paths toward truth
With significant prayer and acts of courage, Hillsdale’s message will continue to represent the ideals we cherish.
The families of our 1.25 million Children’s Scholarship Fund applicants have lit the path to freedom, and they are leading the way.
I wanted to rescue kids from lousy schools and I wanted to offer parents of limited means the freedom to choose the best education for their children.
We realized that there was a need for an organization that would serve as a national clearinghouse of information on existing voucher programs.
The time has come to recover the courage of our forefathers, who understood that faith and freedom are inseparable and that they are worth fighting for.
Hostility toward truth is extremely convenient for reporters because it frees them from the deadening and demeaning task of transmitting facts.
In an age of instant communication, the media creates the impression that sleaze is everywhere.
We who live in the modern age would do well to remember the old adage, “Character is what we are in the dark, when no one is there to see us.”
We all want to be free—politically and spiritually. The cause of a free Tibet, therefore, is the cause of all people.
Most of us have implicitly bought into a version of history that narrowly limits the debate and thus limits our ability to question the status quo.
In American education today, fashions prevail and evidence is seldom asked for or given.
Right now, in this special place and at this special moment in time, let us dedicate ourselves to principles of freedom that imply as much responsibility and discipline as they do independence and choice.
America is still the light of the world, and it is fortunate that the Hillsdale Academy exists, if only to remind people of this important fact.
The key to Nucor’s success is the culture of our company—one that we plan to extend into the next century.
If there is one irrefutable lesson to be learned from history it is that excesses inevitably are their own undoing.
According to recent news reports about the economy, America appears to be doing better than ever before. The stock market is up, the deficit is down—prosperity seems to be everywhere. Morally and culturally, however, it is not an exaggeration to say that we are on the verge of bankruptcy. The fact is that over the last quarter century we have squandered our spiritual capital. When I was a small child, I learned the bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the
Sports and education are inextricably linked in American society. Ideally, they complement one another. Intercollegiate athletics strive to instill specific moral qualities that are meant to be lifelong attributes: sportsmanship, leadership, optimism, self-discipline, loyalty, dedication, commitment, effort, sacrifice, and honor. For over a century and a half, athletics and academics have prospered together at Hillsdale College. Trustees, administrators, faculty, staff, and students have all come to appreciate the fact that intercollegiate athletics play a vital part in the overall mission of the College, which, since 1844, has been to provide such instruction “as will best develop the minds and improve
Sports teach important moral lessons that athletes can apply on and off the playing field.
Anthropologists teach us that notions of the sacred are inherent in human nature. In other words, as human beings we have a natural propensity to consecrate, to sanctify, to make holy. The word “sacred” refers to that which is set apart as holy or which is dedicated to some exalted purpose. We secure sacred things against defamation or violation. Sacred things, then, we say are inviolate. Human life, for example, is inviolate. It is one of the things we hold most sacred. We have strict laws to protect it. Some cultures hold that all life is sacred. There is a
The purpose of art study is not to make artists of our young people; it is to help them become complete human beings.
“Politicians, properly observed, will often disappoint. Ideas, properly understood, seldom will.”
We believe that our form of government, as articulated in the Constitution, has brought forth the most successful society in the history of the world.
We should not keep people with genuine injuries and claims from seeking redress through the judicial process.
In the United States, where we pride ourselves on our understanding of how the free market works, we don’t really appreciate what private property means.
Government doesn’t work. It doesn’t deliver the mail on time. It doesn’t educate our children properly. It doesn’t keep the city safe.
In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court issued three opinions substantially elevating the Constitutional protection of property rights.
In the early years of the Republic, government bore no resemblance to the colossal empire it has evolved into today.
The system of checks and balances in the Constitution is perhaps its most magnificent yet unappreciated feature.
Much of what is described as “good character” or “virtue” reflects the ability to delay or inhibit impulse gratification.
Virtue is indeed the oxygen of a free society. As it fills our lungs, we become a people of strength, capable of vigorously exercising the kind of self-governance that our founding fathers expected of us. Without virtue, however, there can be no self-governance.
What will guarantee the success of our generation and generations to come? I believe that the answer to all these questions is the power of the individual.
“In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.” —Louis Pasteur
No single factor in ancient culture displays this more than Greek tragedy, in which the fall of the exalted shatters any remnant of pride.
Our program is often characterized as “traditional,” and its devotion to time-honored understandings of what constitutes an educated person makes it so.
It isn’t easy these days for students to be decent and responsible, or to even agree upon what those words mean in our troubled modern world.
This confusing of the state of freedom with the state of nihilism is one which colleges must address when students enter the college doors
Someone once observed, “The universe is composed of stories, not atoms.” The Star of Bethlehem is certainly a story, as is most of the Bible.
Each decade offered us hope, but our hopes evaporated into smoke. We became the poorest of the poor, the most segregated minority in schools.
No person decided to spite Mother Teresa. It was the law. And what it required offends common sense.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” The slogan is as fresh today as it was during the presidential campaign four years ago that cost Republicans the White House.
Our vision controls the way we think and, therefore, the way we act.
The future of small business, like the future for our children and our grandchildren, is not in the hands of politicians or bureaucrats. It is in our hands.
America is a nation unique in the history of the world. It is not the product of an accident or evolution.
Dependency upon what government offers—whether empty rights or degrading welfare—has robbed us of the drive so necessary to sustain and strengthen the institutions of the village.
We desperately need to uncover the real root cause of criminal behavior and learn how criminals are formed if we are to fight this growing threat.
When we look at the present system, we are dealing with not just the dispersal of dollars but with the destruction of lives.
The welfare state is much more than a set of entitlements and subsidies—and its impact reaches much further than the disadvantaged underclass
Jesus Christ, the greatest man who ever lived, has changed virtually every aspect of human life—and most people don’t know it.
America is literally built upon the backs of the small businessperson and that is the way it has been throughout our more than 200 years.
If you slept through the sixties, you woke to a different America. It was the pivotal point of the recent past—an authentic decade of decision.
Today, however, the typical college has become a crucible, a place for extracting the passions of politics, race, gender, and other contentious issues.
The word economics, I observed, comes from the Greek “oikos nomos,” which literally means “the law or custom of the home.”
You believe that government is a limited instrument. Washington, D.C. believes that government can create a utopia on earth.
The laws favor false crises instead of real environmental problems and even create greater problems than they were made to eliminate.
Financial costs are not the only burden. Regulations also result in a tremendous loss of one of our most valuable and limited resources—time.
The great paradox of the 1990s is that while liberalism is on its death bed in this country, it still controls almost all our major institutions.
In the 1980s an extraordinary leader attempted to take on big government and to roll back its power over the lives of its citizens.
We forget that good intentions are not enough, and that massive government programs carry unintended consequences.
The Star of Bethlehem is an intersection between Christianity and science, in a world created by a God but who continues to carry out His own purposes.
Health care reform is one of the most complex public policy issues to face this nation since the creation of the social welfare programs of the 1960s.
Schemes of top-down economic coordination are a hopeless absurdity whether tried by the U.S. or the former Soviet Union.
I said at the outset that this stage in Russia’s transition to democracy is cause for optimism and pessimism. Ultimately, I think optimism will triumph.
Look at government. The clear, inexorable drift of the political process has been toward increasing government intrusion.
Throughout history, most of the world has thought of giving and self-sacrifice as a means of earning something in return.
Genuine citizenship involves active participation in that vast realm of human affairs known as civil society.
The leaders of the independent sector would do well to remember that philanthropy does not exist in unfree societies.
Can we really sustain the city of man without the influence of the City of God? St. Augustine argued that it was impossible.
When political entitlement shifted away from citizenship to race, class and gender, a shift in cultural entitlement was made inevitable.
What began as the attempt to politicize psychology (and psychologize politics) had led to the swallowing of each by the other and the emergence of a new form of therapeutic politics.
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited.
Seventy-three years ago, the First World War ended in Europe. The armistice took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month: a symbolic acknowledgement that European civilization had come close to irreversible ruin.
Since 1976, Milwaukee has been under court order to “racially balance” its public schools. Now, there are about one hundred thousand school-age children in this city. Approximately 70 percent are black or belong to other minorities.
Every business and charitable organization should start its own voucher program, for one or one thousand students, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they will have taken a step toward helping others as well as themselves.
Television, in fact, has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system or government or church. Children are particularly susceptible.
The greatness of America is more than its force of arms and the opulence of its economy: Its real power is its vision of an unlimited future.
Socialism is based on a false view of human nature, and its institutions stifle the very conditions—opportunity, creativity and initiative—that make it possible for societies to prosper.
More than half a century ago, America was in the middle of a wrenching depression. One-third of our nation’s wealth vanished in a matter of months.
The ultimate reform is, of course, limiting government, especially the federal government. In the 1990s, this problem has gained a new urgency
The New York Times Magazine recently alerted us to a “return to religion” among intellectuals. It struck me as odd and perhaps even alarming
A required course of studies—a core of learning—can ensure that students have opportunities to know the literature, philosophy, institutions, and art of our own and other cultures.
If our problems are caused by racism, and their solutions dependent on ending racism, our fate is in the hands of people who, by definition, don’t love us.
Gramsci believed that the way for Marxists to come to power was by taking over the cultural institutions of nations: schools, universities, churches, popular entertainment.
On the one hand, the constant refrain of public television is poverty; and, on the other hand, the reality is self-indulgence.
1914 was the first year income tax was collected in this country and the average per-capita tax at that time was just 41 cents.
In words that would inspire for centuries, Socrates refused to stoop to a genuine defense of his actions and what he saw as begging for forgiveness
The conduct of foreign policy today is full of moral language. There is much more moral language than there is morality, or true moral inquiry.
The diction of our news, the images of our television advertising, the cut of our clothing—all these things provide indices to the collective characters.
The hallmark of American citizenship ought to be equal rights of citizenship, without a special bracketing called “civil rights.”
We live in an entrepreneurial era. New businesses are sprouting everywhere, and small business owners possess a renewed measure of social status.
What happened to the Russian POWs after that, however, was far from glorious. They were thrown into wired camps on the open steppe.
Terrorism, in one form or another, is as old as civilization itself. There is a great variety in the methods of attack which can be used today
Webb called “for a review of United States commitments to foreign nations and a re-examination of the deployment of American forces around the world.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not merely a piece of history; it is essential to our future and undergirds much of our national strategy.
Much of the fruits of modern life may be attributed to the generosity and drive of millions of volunteers, philanthropists, and non-profit representatives.
As surprising as it may seem, the selection of a Supreme Court justice can be more important than the selection of a president.
A crisis is regarded as the result of instability, but that instability offers us the opportunity to eliminate some elements and strengthen others.
Douglas Edwards, the senior anchorman at CBS, has called censorship one of the greatest threats to democracy.
With all the serious problems we must face today, the problem of big government is among the most critical. Yet solutions are not lacking.
A little more than 50 years ago, the New Deal farm program was launched. Today, we may refer to its “golden anniversary,” but it is tarnished gold.
The New Deal needs to be examined with candor, now that people no longer are roused to partisan political passions by discussion of the Roosevelt era.
The mid-1980s brought a crisis in availability and affordability of liability insurance that was unprecedented in its impact on our society.
The public has an insatiable interest in criminal law, even though it is civil litigation which is big business in America.
This is a fabulous country. I should know, because I was born in Venice, Italy, in an era when civil rights meant little.
Perhaps no society on earth has been as quick to litigate as the American. Until recently, this was simply an interesting quirk.
Thomas Jefferson once described the Constitution as a text of civil instruction, but it appears that we have sadly neglected it.
My primary purpose is to suggest that a key principle of judicial restraint—namely, interpretivism—is required by our constitutional plan.
For those deeply concerned about a fundamentally liberal order, the embrace of Colbert rather than Smith in our century has been deeply disturbing.
Philosophers and social scientists alike have seemed reluctant to discuss the modern practice of continuous deficit financing in intergenerational terms.
Each generation makes it choices and evaluations about what it wants to save and what it wants to relegate to the dump.
If public and critical interest in the novel has declined, it has done so in large part because the novel has dramatically lost authority.
They have grown up in a society addicted to an hypnotic instrument of passivity; they have the leisure to be drawn into postures that involve no pain.
Washington is a very different world. In my opinion, there’s no tougher place to exhibit leadership. Its inhabitants have confused priorities.
When we were younger we made up stories in our heads—daydreams. Needless to say, the heroes and heroines of these stories were always ourselves.
Long after our boys in Europe were demobilized, Hollywood was still fighting fascism. This catch-all category includes anything opposed to the Left.
No communist regime anywhere in the world is based on the freely given consent of the peoples imprisoned within its borders.
We recognize at once our continuing habits of meretriciousness, sentimentality, and ephemeral or ill-considered “relevance”; our striving for immediate emotional effect over tempered understanding of matter and manner.
The primary concern of political economy is the appropriate role of government in social affairs. The debate, in brief, is whether the economy should be left free to establish a “spontaneous order,” or whether government regulation is necessary to maintain efficiency and economic welfare.
The American people want better education. They ought to be able to get it. But to do so they will have to sweep away whatever obstacles to excellence the educators have erected.
The so-called liberation theologians not only promote a synthesis of Marxism and Christianity, but attempt to ground their recommended restrictions of economic and political freedom on their interpretation of the biblical ethic.
In recent years there has been a coming together of Catholics and Evangelicals motivated by a growing recognition of the threats to Christianity itself posed both by the secular culture and by liberal Christianity.
If you’re a businessman you don’t have time for poetry, unless, of course, you happen to enjoy it the way other businessmen enjoy Monday Night Football.
Today, most Latin American countries are regressing to standards of living of earlier decades. To varying degrees their economies are being deliberately sabotaged by terrorists, obviously well supported by the Marxist international movement and aimed ultimately at the United States.
The great economic attribute of small business is said to be its entrepreneurial bent.
What is taking place in Nicaragua is not the outcome of misguided U.S. policies, regardless of how wise or unwise these policies might actually be. It is the outcome of a philosophy, of a worldview, which divinizes power.
We are here tonight to celebrate the American experience, its glorious legitimacy and success. The drama, excitement, and revolutionary quality of that experience are only barely sensed even by those of us who are carriers of it today.
We, the American people, are carrying a heavy responsibility. If liberty is to survive, if the forces of totalitarianism are to be thwarted in their attempts to expand their grips on mankind, much will depend on us.
As one looks at the strategic issues facing the United States, whether they be in Central America or elsewhere in the world, the framework provided by the Principles of War provides a constructive and useful set of questions with which to formulate a response.
The most sudden and sweeping upheaval in beliefs and values has taken place in this century. No generation in the history of human thought has seen such swift and radical inversion of ideas and ideals as in our lifetime.
What I want to talk about today is something that my confreres in the world of literature and journalism resist: the notion that ideas can become articles of fashion which are adopted with no more foundation than styles in clothing.
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove.
Americans who pay attention to fashions in ideas began hearing about supply-side economics sometime in the mid-1970s. Within half a dozen years, publicists and politicians had succeeded in making the term a household word, electing a new national administration pledged to its implementation, and then actually making some of its precepts the law of the land.
Many in the West were surprised by Yuri Andropov’s rapid seizure of power in the Soviet Union following Leonid Brezhnev’s death in November 1982.
Most historians agree, I think, that the United States was born of a conservative defense of American liberty.
We can anticipate that recombinant DNA technology will present problems that are as pervasive and disquieting as those that have sprung from nuclear fission.
Science raises many important issues for society—yet none are more important than those being created by genetic engineering.
Without doubt Americans regard themselves as a free people. But how well does their society fit the prescription of freedom?
One of the great myths of our time is the belief in the great melting pot of American ethnicity, into which have been blended the cultures and values of disparate peoples from the world over.
America today is in need of leadership of the sort provided in the past by our greatest presidents, presidents whom we mean to honor and praise when we denominate them “statesmen.”
Education is always an instrument of social values and social policy, so that understanding the social context is important in understanding education.
St. Paul viewed the Roman state not only as benign, and protective of the rights of its citizens, but even as in some way part of the Providence of God.
Government, on this view, is limited to the specific function of protecting individual rights and has no other function.
The fact is that we live in a time of fateful challenges. As a people and a nation we are under test. This challenge is, of course, Marxism-Leninism.
This attitude toward America as being experimental, as being provocative, as being a test of human possibility, has almost totally been lost.
We can confound the prophets of doom by opening the vast and rich High Frontier of space for industrialization.
This, then, would be wisdom’s final fruit: to be true to self, yet never to become a slave of self.
It is within the territory of refined emotions where the final battle of a regenerated, healthy, and moral society will take place.
Capitalism has been indicted on many counts.
True consumer protection, it stands to reason, is that which advocates free market solutions, opposing any action by government or business which discourages competition—because competition surely is what provides the consumer with his advantage in the marketplace.
Government may occasionally violate the Constitution, and that when it does, a citizen’s loyalty may consist of resistance to government.
For all the recorded history of human beings on this earth, various degrees of tyranny have been the natural state of affairs for most people.
But, on the Christian view, if it is not sanctity toward which we must move, on pain of our lives, then what is it?
Abraham Lincoln once said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
We must remember that the nation we are defending is a great nation, and that the economy we want to preserve is a great economy.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison: “The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
The Soviets are traditionally wary of envoys who speak their language, who are well versed in Soviet objectives and strategy and who are not easily duped.
In simpler days a reporter went out and covered a political speech and came back and wrote his story. The paper printed it, and the reader received it.
Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote these words: “The American republic will endure until the politicians find they can bribe the people with their own money.”
In sum, our technology has propelled us into a new era where we have achieved an awesome power to disrupt the very rhythms of life and to inflict costs
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” So wrote the notable German philosopher, George Hegel.
The special vice of the media is that they create a “false consciousness.” We may know what they say about things we are familiar with is unreliable, but we think they must be reliable about other things.
In the last two years the United States has not only lost influence and allies, it has rapidly lost its ability to shape the direction in which the world is moving.
The Administration continues to tell us that SALT II and the SALT process is so important that we must exclude anything else from the discussions.
I accepted the views of these good men, that once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs
Public interest in education—possibly because most families have contacts with educational institutions—is focused on opportunity and performance.
John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in December 18, 1819: “Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry?”
In the course of life, whether it has to do with family or business, joy or sadness, one needs a basic compass for judgments.
A loss of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.
To understand the role of the press in revolution, however, we must accept the press as both important in the fight for freedom and a tool of oppression throughout its history. It has not been simply one or the other: it has been both.
What lies ahead for the industry? Recently Mr. Schlesinger of the Department of Energy promised a golden age for the oil industry for the next twenty years. But there was one little string attached.
The kernel of my charge against the regulatory agencies is that their structure might have been contrived to make them responsive to pressure from media and consumerist groups.
We go on trying to understand politics in terms of politics alone, as though political beliefs and problems existed in a vacuum.
The modern American Food Machine is perhaps the greatest single source of strength undergirding the unparalleled level of American living.
No myth of the 20th century is more pervasive than the belief that intellectuals determine the climate of opinion and shape the values of their society.
John Adams told a friend in 1765: I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene.
Arnold Toynbee’s theory of history holds that civilizations grow by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities
All of our great presidents tangled with the press, and their supporters made reference to its power and ability to set the agenda of the national debate.
I am going to argue that ideas often stand in an illuminating relationship to some objective reality, but that often, perhaps most of the time, that is not their primary function.
If you hold a set of political beliefs, not so much because they seem right to you but because you like to think of yourself as the sort of person who holds those beliefs, then you are capable of committing a wealth of excess in the name of those beliefs.
In the past few decades, a growing tide of regulations has increased the demand for oil while simultaneously restricting domestic supplies of oil, coal, nuclear power, and natural gas.
Political support for saving and building of wealth seems to offer little promise of popular acclaim or votes at elections.
I will only note that economic inequalities somehow still survive despite the incredible complexities that have been written into the law to reduce them.
One of the problems is that government has decided that the tax system can be used as handy incentive to prod people into doing supposedly desirable things.
Have these United States—or rather, the people of this country—lost the sense of what makes life worth living?
In its loopholes, the federal income tax shows bias in favor the low (or no) producer and against the high producer and earner.
Without the New Left there would have been no outraged cry from Middle Americans for the restoration of order.
In contemplating the situation in higher education today, one is hard put to find a phraseology of sufficient force to reflect the disarray that has come.
When one looks at the changes in education over the century in the United States, one is led to the conclusion that there are three major areas of thrust.
Science is increasingly coming under attack. Not only from outsiders who do not understand science but now also from disrupters within.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a context for understanding why the issue of sexual equality will be so difficult to resolve.
In the American system, there are four main lines of defense between the free society and chaos.
Any agreement reached with the Soviet government must be evaluated in the context of their past record and their domestic and foreign policies.
Those of us in the advantaged top 10 percent in business are the ones with the opportunity, the obligation, and the safe means to do the corrective job.
Before the fall of Spiro Agnew it was fast becoming the new conventional wisdom to believe our communications media had become philosophically corrupt.
This address (non-controversial and non-partisan) is on the subject because as Americans we ought always, like Lincoln, to seek for the meaning of great events.
There is a portion of the educational market that operates outside the government structure, free to rise or fall to satisfy market demands.
There are many other men who, in our time of troubles and mass uniformity of opinion have maintained their moral and intellectual integrity.
The American public, taken as a whole, has forgotten—or else never knew—that the ends of education are wisdom and virtue.
We know of no human community whose members do not have a vision of perfection in which the frustrations inherent in our human condition are transcended.
The common denominator of crime is a twofold loss of motivation to be responsible: a breakdown of internal morality and failure of external sanction.
The first thing to be said about wage and price fixing is that it is harmful at any time and under any conditions.