Thomas E. Ricks Quotes

Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.

in 1942 in an essay in which he meditated on some “visions of a totalitarian future.” In it, he explained why he thought the working class would be most resistant to an intrusive right-wing state:

to study a situation, evaluate its facts, decide which ones were meaningful, develop a course of action in response to work toward a desired outcome, and verbalize the orders that needed to be issued. Those are the basic steps in critical thinking,

Adams was paying attention to such thinking. He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew’s reputation.

Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, “To be enlightened was to be filled with hope.”54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was “superstition, intolerance, tyranny.”55

Orwell once commented that “whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.

Yet Orwell never fit into the BBC. At about the same time, he wrote in his diary, “Its atmosphere is something between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum,

Prudent, considerate, careful, determined, honest, and inflexible:

We can all endeavor to do the same, pursuing the facts of the matter, especially about the past of our own country. Facts are impressively dual in their effects. “Truth and reconciliation” meetings in Argentina, South Africa, and in parts of Spain’s Basque country have demonstrated that facts are marvelously effective tools — they can rip down falsehoods but can also lay the foundations for going forward. For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly. The accurate view almost always will, at first, be a minority position. Those in power often will want to divert people from the hard facts of a given matter, whether in Russia, Syria, or indeed at home. Why did it take so long for white Americans to realize that our police often treat black Americans as an enemy to be intimidated, even today? Why do we allow political leaders who have none of Churchill’s fealty to traditional institutions to call themselves “conservatives”? The struggle to see things as they are is perhaps the fundamental driver of Western civilization. There is a long but direct line from Aristotle and Archimedes to Locke, Hume, Mill, and Darwin, and from there through Orwell and Churchill to the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” It is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it, and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter.

Orwell depicts the proletarians as essentially uncontrollable. The state does not try to control them as much as it simply distracts them.

Indeed, it was a skill Washington had acquired rather painfully in his two wars. In leading combat operations, slow and steady thinking, followed with energetic execution, often is more effective than a series of hasty moves that tend to exhaust a force and expose it to attack.

Jefferson would remain devoted to Epicurean thought for the remainder of his life. He summarized that belief system thusly: Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice90

relatively powerless — the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the

So, he continued, if the government controls the established church, then the church ultimately must answer to the people. Thus, he concludes, the people “have the power to governe the Church, to see her do her duty, & to correct her, to redress, reform, establish, & c.

spent “a Clowdy morning” reading Charles Rollin’s Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, which is basically an introduction to education by the rector of the University of Paris.68 Rollin was even better known for his Ancient History, which was published in French in sixteen volumes from 1730 to 1738, with the first translation into English appearing a year after that. It, along with his later work on Roman history, soon became what one historian terms “a principal medium through which they [colonial Americans] learned about classical heroes.”69 Adams thought Washington had gotten most of his knowledge of the ancient world from that text,