Thomas E. Ricks Quotes

How long shall thy Madness outbrave our justice?

Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you from enjoying it,” he wrote in April 1946. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators, nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

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,

Jefferson was notably ambivalent about the French philosopher. “In the science of government Montesquieu’s spirit of laws is generally recommended. It contains indeed a great number of political truths; but almost an equal number of political heresies: so that the reader must be constantly on his guard.

On December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own party’s government, stepped out of a taxi on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

the theme that runs powerfully through all of Orwell’s writings, from his early work on Burmese Days through the late 1930s and then through the great essays, and into Animal Farm and 1984, is the abuse of power in the modern world by both the left and the right.

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.

And what voices! A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness & richness combined with a fundamental ill-will — people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful.

Rollin’s works were not just records of events, but also instruction manuals about how to live, and especially how to acquire virtue.

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

Ask an American soldier to identify himself, and he probably will say he is “in the Army.” By contrast, a Marine — especially if he is one of the better ones — is likely to say, “I’m a Marine.” The small linguistic difference is significant: The first is a matter of membership or occupation; the second speaks to identity.

We do not call ourselves ‘Native American,’ because our blood and people were here long before this land was called the Americas. We are older than America can ever be and do not know the borders.

When he went through a cancer scare and had a benign tumor removed, his sometime friend Evelyn Waugh remarked that it was typical of modern science to find the only part of him that was not malignant and remove it. Randolph was an alcoholic for most of his adult life,

The view that there are limits to the powers of rulers traveled with the colonists to New England, where the relationship between church, state, and the people became a subject of intense discussion. As early as 1644, Roger Williams (Cambridge, 1627), the colonial Puritan dissident, had argued in a book that “the Soveraigne, orginal and foundation of civill power lies in the people.” Hence, he added, governments were entitled to exercise power only as long as they held the trust of the people.

Essentially these books consist of asking the reader to forget about the forest of Churchill’s life and instead focus on a few trees that a given writer believes deserve more attention