My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead--months in which our patience and our will will be tested--months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.

There is nothing we need to do that isn't dangerous.

Nothing is more dangerous to good government than great power in improper hands.

I don’t think anybody truly knows where we’re going from here yet. It depends on too many unknowns. We don’t know where the COVID virus is going to take us. We don’t know where Black Lives Matter is going to take us right now. Do we get a real practical conversation going about race and policing and ultimately about the economic inequality that’s been a stain on our social contract? And of course, nobody knows where our next election is going to take us. I believe that our current president is a threat to our democracy. He simply makes any kind of reform that much harder. I don’t know if our democracy could stand another four years of his custodianship. These are all existential threats to our democracy and our American way of life.

I'm anything but skittish about government, but I must say this administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous.

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is danger­ous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apa­thy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.

It is a far greater danger if the President feels empowered to violate federal criminal law, buoyed by the knowledge of future immunity. I am deeply troubled by the idea, inherent in the majority’s opinion, that our Nation loses something valuable when the President is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law.

"Dangerous" does not mean exciting or bold; it means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.

Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely. After all, this has been the human challenge since a certain group of primates became human in the first place. Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech — and both are still dangerous to this day — but human beings would not be human without them.

A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course.

We reaffirm that there remain four dangers facing the nation that the Party has already warned of. They have developed in a complex, interconnected and mutually-influenced manner. None of them can be ignored but particular attention should be paid to the danger of lagging further behind in economic development and the danger of corruption, bureaucracy, and moral degradation of not a small number of Party cadres and members.

Almost all general statements about the world are wrong. They are not necessarily false; they seem to me just to be inadequate. It is true, for example, that communism is a deadly danger, but Russia is a different kind of danger from Yugoslavia. A small Communist Party in Africa is a different danger from the Government of Red China. These different dangers require different policies and different actions, and different replies. As President, I have no special gift or prophecy. But I do have a special perspective, and a very special responsibility to anticipate the dangers and the opportunities of the future.

The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger.

It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.