3 December 2020 Jon Meacham A lot of people, including business leaders, think the future belongs to China. Globalization is not a zero-sum game, but we need to hone our skills to stay in play.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham The power of the American system of republicanism lies in its capacity to allow religious belief to be a competing, not a controlling, factor in American life.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham Given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham The fact is that America has been at her most prosperous when government and the private sector have been not at war, but in a wary, if often underplayed, alliance. History is unmistakable on this point.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom – not least freedom of conscience.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham A wise nation should cultivate a political spirit that allows opponents to cooperate without fearing an automatic execution from their core supporters. Who knew that the real rogues in American politics would be the ones who dare to get along?
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham A globalized world is by now a familiar fact of life. Building walls or moats may sound appealing, but the future belongs to those who tend to their people and then boldly engage the rest of the world, near and far.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham The traditional religious right’s failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham Without education, we are weaker economically. Without economic power, we are weaker in terms of national security. No great military power has ever remained so without great economic power.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham Attacks on a politician’s identity – questioning Romney’s religion, say, or Obama’s birthplace – tend to come when an opponent is desperate and can’t sell himself.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham The bringing-about of order is the first and fundamental task of government. We accept limits on our rights for the sake of a larger social compact all the time.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn’t work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won’t work for you either.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham The attacks of September 11 – and subsequent acts of terror from London to Madrid to Fort Hood, Texas – embody the most repulsive of human instincts, the will to power at the price of the lives of others.
3 December 2020 Jon Meacham The middle class, one of the great achievements in history, is becoming more of a relic than a reality.
