The American university system is enormous and it plays an enormous role in making the nation what it is — it is not too much to say, in fact, that it is an equal partner in the military-industrial-academic complex that essentially runs the country.
There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.
The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than “newness”) and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).
William F. Buckley, Jr., “Our Mission Statement,” National Review (November 19, 1955).
That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction (1978)
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774).
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.
Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction (1978)
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (April 4, 1819).
The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation.
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays, “Salvation by Force.”
The Thirteen States are Thirteen Sovereign bodies.