Quotes

• Erskine Bowles on Paul Ryan : "Have any of you all met Paul Ryan? We should get him to come to the university. I’m telling you this guy is amazing. I always thought that I was okay with arithmetic, but this guy can run circles around me. And he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion… The President came out with his own plan and the President as you remember, came out with a budget and I don’t think anybody took that budget very seriously. The Senate voted against it 97 to nothing."
• Calvin Coolidge on the 4th : "About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."
  
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• The New York Times on the Gulf Disaster : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06rig.html
• What Books Every High School Student Should Have Read : "The works of Shakespeare, the Declaration of Independence, Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and the Bible lead the list of works that every high school student ought to be required to read, in the opinion of some scholars, journalists, teachers and governmental and cultural leaders.
  
  "Mr. Bennett put the question to a list of experts of his own selection.
  
  "Responses from 325 people were compiled, 73 replying to Bennett's letter, 84 to an article that George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, devoted to the project and 168 high school teachers who took part in summer seminars sponsored by the Government agency and the Mellon Foundation.
  
  "Thirty works were mentioned most frequently. Mr. Bennett commented that any 10 of them "would compare favorably to what is read in many schools," and added that he himself had not read all 30 on the list.
  
  "No book published in the last 30 years made the list.
  
  "Recommended Reading
  
  "Shakespeare's plays, especially "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," were the only works listed by a majority of the participants - 71 percent.
  
  "Fifty percent cited such documents of United States history as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Next came "Huckleberry Finn," the Bible and these works of literature, philosophy and politics:
  
  - Homer's "Odyssey" and "Iliad."
  
  - Dickens's "Great Expectations" and "Tale of Two Cities."
  
  - Plato's "Republic."
  
  - John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath."
  
  - Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter."
  
  - Sophocles' "Oedipus."
  
  - Melville's "Moby Dick."
  
  - Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four."
  
  - Thoreau's "Walden."
  
  - The poems of Robert Frost.
  
  - Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."
  
  - F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby."
  
  - Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."
  
  - Marx's "Communist Manifesto."
  
  - Aristotle's "Politics."
  
  - The poems of Emily Dickinson.
  
  - Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment."
  
  - The novels of William Faulkner.
  
  - J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye."
  
  - De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America."
  
  - Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice."
  
  - The essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
  
  - Machiavelli's "Prince."
  
  - Milton's "Paradise Lost."
  
  - Tolstoy's "War and Peace."
  
  - Virgil's "Aeneid.""
  
  --NYTIMES, 8-12-84
• Oliver W. Holmes on Memorial Day : "But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death--of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. "
  
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• Charter vs Public Schools in NYC : "On one side there’s the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there’s a regular public school, P.S. 149, with 438 pre-K to 8th-grade students. They are separated only by a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and cafeteria. School reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education — the union, big-system bureaucracy and low expectations for disadvantaged children.
  
  "On the charter side, the children are quiet, dressed in uniforms, hard at work — and typically performing at or above grade level. Their progress in a variety of areas is tracked every six weeks, and teachers are held accountable for it. They are paid about 5 to 10 percent more than union teachers with their levels of experience. The teachers work longer than those represented by the union: school starts at 7:45 a.m., ends at 4:30 to 5:30 and begins in August. The teachers have three periods for lesson preparation, and they must be available by cellphone (supplied by the school) for parent consultations, as must the principal. They are reimbursed for taking a car service home if they stay late into the evening to work with students. There are special instruction sessions on Saturday mornings. The assumption that every child will succeed is so ingrained that (in a flourish borrowed from the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter network) each classroom is labeled with the college name of its teacher and the year these children are expected to graduate (as in “Yale 2026” for one kindergarten class I recently visited). The charter side of the building spends $18,378 per student per year. This includes actual cash outlays for everything from salaries to the car service, plus what the city says (and the charter disputes) are the value of services that the city contributes to the charter for utilities, building maintenance and even “debt service” for its share of the building.
  
  "On the other side of the fire door, I encounter about a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their school day at about 8:30. Others wander the halls. Instead of the matching pension contributions paid to the charter teachers that cost the school $193 per student on the public-school side, the union contract provides a pension plan that is now costing the city $2,605 per year per pupil. All fringe benefits, including pensions and health insurance, cost $1,341 per student on the charter side, but $5,316 on this side. For the public-school teachers to attend a group meeting after hours with the principal (as happens at least once a week on the charter side) would cost $41.98 extra per hour for each attendee, and attendance would still be voluntary. Teachers are not obligated to receive phone calls from students or parents at home. Although the city’s records on spending per student generally and in any particular school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that it costs at least $19,358 per year to educate each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.
  
  "But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149 is rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.
  
  "Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students."
  
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• Chesterton on Superstition and the Modern World : "The world, especially the modern world, has reached a curious condition of ritual or routine; in which we might almost say that it is wrong even when it is right. It continues to a great extent to do the sensible things. It is rapidly ceasing to have any of the sensible reasons for doing them. It is always lecturing on the deadness of tradition; and it is living entirely on the life of tradition. It is always denouncing us for superstition; and its own principal virtues are now almost entirely superstitions."--GK Chesterton, Why I Am A Catholic
• Raquel Welch on Parenting and Teens : "Sex is being held up for the new generation as the be all and end all. It's supposed to be an expression of your regard for someone. It's in our faces every waking minute. We worship sex, but for most people it doesn't take that long. It has its place, but it's just too prevalent. I know I sound like a prude, but can't we have cheerleaders that don't do spread eagle and grinding? Britney Spears would remember that she was a lot more happening when she wasn't pushing it. I did some of it myself and at some point it wasn't productive.
  
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• Richard Nixon on Hatred : "Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. And so, we leave with high hopes, in good spirit, and with deep humility, and with very much gratefulness in our hearts. I can only say to each and every one of you, we come from many faiths, we pray perhaps to different gods -- but really the same God in a sense -- but I want to say for each and every one of you, not only will we always remember you, not only will we always be grateful to you but always you will be in our hearts and you will be in our prayers."
  
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• Lady Gaga v. The Middle East-By Bret Stephens : "There may well be good reasons for Israel to dismantle many of them, assuming that such an act is met with reciprocal and credible Palestinian commitments to suppress terrorism and religious incitement, and accept Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. But to imagine that the settlements account for even a fraction of the rage that has inhabited the radical Muslim mind since the days of Qutb is fantasy: The settlements are merely the latest politically convenient cover behind which lies a universe of hatred. If the administration's aim is to appease our enemies, it will get more mileage out of banning Lady Gaga than by applying the screws on Israel. It should go without saying that it ought to do neither."
  
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• Thomas Jefferson's Advice to a Young Person : "Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss."
  
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• Obama's Legacy & The Nuclear Bomb-Alan Dershowitz : "Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, [if Iran becomes a nuclear nation], Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction."
  
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• Victor Davis Hanson on Tom Hanks' Anti-American Slander : "All in all, such moral equivalence (the Japanese and the U.S. were supposedly about the same in their hatreds) is quite sad, and yet another commentary on our postmodern society that is as ignorant about its own past as it is confused in its troubled present."
  
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• Robert Kagan on Obama's Multilateralism : "This administration pays lip-service to multilateralism, but it is a multilateralism of accommodating autocratic rivals, not of solidifying relations with longtime democratic allies. Rather than strengthening the democratic foundation of the new international architecture -- the G-20 world -- the administration's posture is increasingly one of neutrality, at best, between allies and adversaries, and between democrats and autocrats. Israel is not the only unhappy ally, therefore; it's just the most vulnerable."
  
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• George Will on Manhood : "At the 2006 Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones sang 'Satisfaction,' a song older than the Super Bowl. At this year's game, another long-of-tooth act, the Who, continued the commerce of catering to 'aby boomers' limitless appetite for nostalgia. "My generation's obsession with youth and its memories,' Cross writes, 'stands out in the history of human vanity.' "Last November, when Tiger Woods's misadventures became public, his agent said: 'Let's please give the kid a break.' The kid was then 33. He is now 34 but, no doubt, still a kid. The puerile anthem of a current Pepsi commercial is drearily prophetic: 'Forever young.'
  
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• Newsweek: Iraq: "Victory At Last" : "[S]omething that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East."
  
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• James Bryce on America : "The Americans are at bottom a conservative people, in virtue both of the deep instincts of their race and of that practical shrewdness which recognizes the value of permanence and solidity in institutions. They are conservative in their fundamental beliefs, in the structure of their governments, in their social and domestic usages. They are like a tree whose pendulous shoots quiver and rustle with the lightest breeze, while its roots enfold the rock with a grasp which storms cannot loosen."
  
  James Bryce (The American Commonwealth, Vol. 2, Chapter LXXX)
  
  
• Dan Coats on Character : "Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self-defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character."
  
  
• Abstinence Education Works : "A new study released today, shows that abstinence education is highly effective in reducing sexual activity among youth. It also showed “safe sex” and “comprehensive” sex ed programs to be ineffective."
  
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• Abraham Lincoln & Life : "Nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows."
  
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