“The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense [MacIntyre] turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language.”
“Obviously elections are political in terms of who wins and loses, but the process should not be political.”
“In all other religions, you have people who become atheists. Only in Christianity, God himself goes through this experience.”
“There is such a thing as progress. I am no Pollyanna, and human nature doesn’t change much, but there’s undoubtedly progress.”
“Yes, as you mentioned, one of the most interesting findings of Lament for a Nation, which came out in 1965—it’s Grant’s most famous book—is that in Grant’s view, there’s really no such thing as American conservatism.”
“For example, with a container of yogurt, I know its price, calories, calcium content, and vitamin content. But if I need a hip replacement, I have no data to judge the quality of the physician, hospital, or other sites where the surgery might be performed.”
“[My book seeks to] disrupt science in the sense that it gets us away from the myth that doing more physics and chemistry will be the answer to understanding the living and, in particular, the human being.”
“One of the really significant differences in terms of how young people are being raised today and their formative and teens years and previous generations is how slowly they’re reaching major milestones, such as getting married [and] owning a home, the sort of signs of adulthood…”
“So you see why people are not satisfied: I don’t propose simple solutions. In my old age, I’m returning from Marx to Hegel.”
“Hamas wants to maximize the death of its civilian population. The purpose is to get the international community, the United Nations, the United States, other governments around the world, to condemn Israel, to vilify Israel, to delegitimize Israel, and undermine the Jewish state in that way.”
“The feminists have deserted Jewish women. And it wasn’t just Jewish women. There were Arab Muslim women, and there were Thai Buddhist women. No doubt many Christian women or some Christian women who were also raped, murdered, and kidnapped.”
“Meaningful work is as important to life as leisure, I think. I just think that we’ve lost the balance.”
“The so-called conservative movement of the 1980s was anything but conservative.”
“The most common precursor of gender dysphoria, though, seems to be intense social media use. The gender dysphoria more often seems to stem from that rather than from the home.”
“Humphrey’s insurgency at the convention basically lashed Truman to the mast of [Humphrey’s] own civil rights agenda. And desegregating the armed forces was arguably the single most important civil rights cause of that moment in time.”
“There really hasn’t been anybody like him since he passed…This is why there are these long compilations of ‘Hitchslaps’ on YouTube. It’s why most of the tributes to him focus on his rhetorical prowess—and just his brilliance on the debate stage.”
“Regulating your own emotions is something most people are capable of doing…It doesn’t require you constantly expressing [a problem], thinking about it, [and] sharing it with everyone…There’s something about not fixating too much on your own problems and really dwelling on them but, instead, doing s
“One thing I’ve learned [from] being in combat sports is that it’s internationally watched everywhere, in every country.”
“The great thing is the universe is as amazing as it is without all of the fairytales. The universe is far more amazing than anything that has come up in any scriptural book because the imagination of nature is much greater than the imagination of human beings.”
“We will be nothing like the way we are now. It will be like a night and day transformation. And it always does require violence because, as you said, that class or race enemy that stands in the way of future bliss simply has to be gotten rid of.”
“There is a lot of hope. Every time I go there and meet with the new generation, I think that they definitely want for their country to be a successful one. And that’s the conversation in Iraq. Most people have now forgotten about the war.”
“I’d be very surprised if a super intelligent AI a thousand years from now cannot recreate everything. Also, like so many other people, including Elon, I believe there’s probably a 50% chance we’re in a simulation. So, that would defeat the idea of death as well.”
“There [are] ways to teach about the past that are humanistic; that are agency-focused; and that are focused on generative things rather than destructive things—rather than dismantling things and tearing things down with no plan forward of what happens after the destruction.”
“All of the sudden, I was on the phone with Mike Pence… ‘I just finished Old Abe last night, and I had to track you down and tell you how much I loved it, and it’s the best book about Lincoln I’ve ever read.’ And, for ten minutes, he just wanted to talk about Lincoln.”
“You could read my book…as a kind of homage to the magazine.”
“And my argument is that freedom and progress in the context of the cyborg era are actually inimical to women’s interests. They don’t make things better for any women, except [for] a very small, elite subset.”
“I’m not optimistic at all that campuses can be reformed. They certainly cannot be reformed from within…Academia is gone. It is a monoculture. It is a hermetically sealed bubble.”
“It’s career ending, really…Anybody who tries to [speak out] will be shunned.”
“Scientific conferences are being determined based on sex and race. It’s going to slow down medical progress, and it is also going to put physicians in the ER and the operating room who are not the top qualified.”
“And, later in life, when I was dealing with my father coming out of prison and perhaps rekindling that relationship, I started to look at my experience slightly differently. I started sharing bits and pieces of my story with people and, to my surprise, found that some of the reactions were positive
“Any coherent system of morality begins with an appreciation of human dignity and wanting people to have as many choices to take control of their lives as possible.”
“My father’s skin is in those pharmaceutical companies.”
“Conservatives are certainly not socialists. Conservatives do not believe, as the Marxists do, that you can open up some central office with really bright people and dictate the course of the entire economy of the nation. We don’t believe anything like that. On the other hand…”
“Sometimes, I would even dream about some of the people I had interviewed on the stories. And, so through the years, I had the idea to write a book and put it all together and try to return to some of the stories.”
“The ten out of a thousand entrepreneurial ideas that are amazing—we’ll find out what those are. And they will be the ones that dominate [in] the next generation.”
“I don’t see a full, vigorous pivot by this President (and this White House) back toward the themes and approaches that Joe Biden articulated in his 2020 presidential race.”
“Ron Paul is so beloved because he is so principled. That is what we are focused on here. We will work with other people who share our interests, but we’re not going to sacrifice our principles to do it.”
“At the end of the day, it’s a pretty simple business that we’re in: We want to understand culture, we want to understand consumers’ thinking, and we’re just trying to answer why’s.”
“Every generation, we need to learn and relearn how thin the line can be between having a basically liberal society and a basically authoritarian society.”
“No one is exempt from being a victim of some sort of crime. And it’s very appropriate that I use that title [of victim] in terms of the VICTIM Act.”
“My wife and I used to go vacation in San Francisco. We don’t anymore…This is what’s headed toward the rest of the nation.”
“You have to have a steel spine in your liberalism. ‘What kind of government did you create, sir?’ ‘We created a republic, if [you] can keep it.’ The ‘if you can keep it’ part requires a steel spine.”
” I think that we are, as always, pragmatic idealists.”
“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with debate. In fact, debate, in certain circumstances, can be good, but we can often solve the problems…through conversation.”
“Eventually, I had an emotional crisis because I could no longer reconcile the life of abundance that the U.S. afforded me. I made a pact with myself that from here on, I’m really going to try to see what needs to happen for [Africa] to thrive.”
“Too often, people think of corruption as something that happens somewhere else: in Russia, in authoritarian regimes.”
Henri Mattila and Erich Prince tell the story of Merion West.
“I got the call on January 10th [2017] from CNN and then BuzzFeed about them running with this hoax. I pointed out at the time that it was wrong. I could demonstrably prove it was wrong. And yet, they stuck by it…”
“I think the downside of going test-optional, the downside of ignoring what assessments tell you, means that you might end up ignoring the underlying structural problems and never fixing the inequities.”
“To understand how land use regulation can help save California from the dystopian future it is currently facing, I spoke with Nolan Gray, an urban planner and outspoken land use policy wonk.”
“This brings in the status issue again, doesn’t it? Because there are so many careers that people just wouldn’t consider because how would they tell their friends?”
“But one of the dangers is it’s very easy when there is change that makes someone uncomfortable to immediately say that this is a society that’s in decline and to blame somebody for causing it.”
“The other fans that have a dangerously inaccurate idea about what it means to be Stoic are the ‘Broics.’”
“We lost the All-Star Game, but I think we won the battle because that fight has moved to other states now because we are on the right side of this issue, and we push back so hard.”
“The long-term problem there is that if your feminism becomes associated with anti-natalism, sooner or later it’s going to trigger a backlash, and that backlash is not going to look very nice for women.”
“What I have found in the book is strong enough to suggest that there is a correlation between mass migration from Muslim-majority countries and the increase in sexual violence.”
“Interest group pressure typically opens up immigration.”
“Secondly, I’d say good advice is to gain familiarity with the saints and to perhaps gain some friends among the saints because often they are the best examples.”
“One of the reasons our anti-poverty efforts in America don’t do better is we start too late. We need to help kids early on.”
“Well, the first paragraph basically says it all. It begins with ‘The continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed.’”
“I’m Robert Jensen. I’ll be your guide into the restless and relentless mind of Wes Jackson. I first bumped into Wes’ work more than three decades ago, and his ideas have had a profound influence on my thinking about society and ecology.”
“I go through a whole analysis of that and why—statistically speaking—you’re basically making a very broad statement about white people in general based on one observation in one Jeopardy! episode.”
“In the battleground states, since 2000, Republicans have won the popular vote four out of six times. In fact, Donald Trump—in 2020—won the battleground states by over 2.1 million votes.”
“And he wrote this very famous novel called Infinite Jest, which he described as a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness. And so, I think in some ways, I’ve written a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness as well.”
“I think there’s great potential in video games. In some ways, they are the primary space in which the culture wars are now being fought.”
“And so I remembered from college: When you’re facing a problem that seems deeply puzzling, go back to fundamentals, go to first principles. So I took Aristotle’s Politics off my shelf, my old college copy, and reread it in the context of the election of Donald Trump.”
“And so I think we have to resist the tendency to try to define a new administration’s foreign policy mainly as an opposition to the administration that came before it.”
“The UCMJ has some key aspects to it which do not afford military personnel the same degree of presumption of innocence that you’d see in a civilian court.”
“The way we farm and the way we think are connected—that’s our premise.”
“One of the big issues was health care reform; my own parents struggled with the cost of prescription medications, using up all of their discretionary income to pay for my father’s insulin and other medications.”
“It’s clear that so many cities are going through a lot of the same challenges that New Haven is facing right now.”
“I studied Elizabethan England as a graduate student. It was a society governed by ideas of honor, and I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe some of those ideas could be returned to usefulness.’”
“He was the first to negotiate with Native Americans as a Christian, keeping the Christian-Quaker pacifist traditions in his negotiations. He actually regarded the Native Americans as equals…”
“Al Davis used to say, ‘Just win, baby.’ And I tell you that’s what Americans do best. Once we wake up, once we’re engaged, once we know that our culture is at risk, we come together and start communicating. Across-party lines, Democrats and Republicans start to talk, and we rise.”
“Do you realize how strange it is that professionals can move around Europe more freely than they can in the U.S.? And that overall, Alabama has more autonomy over its regulations than France does?”
“And I’ll have to say this: This was the worst job I ever had, but it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
“Policies that try to tackle diversity problems make it always salient in people’s minds. And that can backfire, even if well-meant.”
“How can I say I care about what I’m doing if I’m not willing to put myself in situations that might make me uncomfortable?”
“[Historically,] Islamic societies were actually more advanced, more liberal, and more tolerant than Western societies. So, there is nothing intrinsic to Islam that explains these problems.”
“The problem is, though, we can’t rely on volunteerism, donations, and gifts for much longer because—quite frankly—most of these places are getting pretty tapped out.”
“In polarized times, think of the other person as an individual and not member of the other group.”
“But there is no question that we’ve got some major issues, and free speech is so dependent these days on these big tech companies, so they have to be very careful that free speech is protected. And, of course, there’s a pattern now that shows otherwise…”
“I was in poverty once, and then I became an entrepreneur. And now I am running for office…This is the greatest country in the world.”
“Maybe there are some lessons learned, so this never happens again.”
“This is an attempt at a social, cultural, and political revolution.”
“Political ideas are too abstract. They are not enough to make people emotional about identity. Swiss identity has a cultural element.”
“Our system in United States is set up in a way that forces us to compromise. The Founders thought the great threat to a democracy is factionalism.”
“I have never been more depressed about the state of truth in the world.”
“His interrogators were telling him that we have gangs who could ‘stab your daughter or wife in London.’”
“On her ouster from The Daily Orange, the student journalist says: ‘It also affects me as student because all my peers have banded together and tried to cancel me.’”
“They reject ideas of the extreme, so that’s why there needs to be a delineation between what’s extreme and what’s not extreme.”
Listen to our conversation with the candidate to hear how his platform can tackle the greatest problems facing the United States today.
“There has been a huge transfer of wealth to the rich and gradual collapse of the middle class. That’s made a lot of people anxious.“
“The police issue here now is a local issue, and we will let them work it out. If I was a president now, I would say no, we not not need to do something.”
“The last time a leading Danish politician was murdered was 1286. It’s not war with your foreign enemies [that matters]; it’s internally, in political stability.”
“I think people want to know the story behind things. And I think part of what they’re buying into is the story of our family on our ranch. And so it’s beautiful to be able to share that in some small way.”
“My sense is that most people—even people who truly abhor a lot of the stuff that I write—were supportive and were sort of horrified by the decision and by what happened.”
“And I have a choice right now: Do I vote for Joe Biden, a white guy who locked black people up? Or do I vote for President Donald Trump, a white guy who happens to be a Republican, who let black people out of jail and gave them a second chance?”
“For the ‘Signaling When No One Is Watching,’ basically what we were interested in was motivated by previous research suggesting that people are strongly motivated to signal to others that they’re morally good.”
