Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.
Under the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion, the Court has steadily made religion a matter for the private individual by driving it out of the public arena.
I was thinking of resigning since I did not want to be perceived as a man who did the president’s bidding to save my job. I have had some time to think about it since. I think I did the right thing.
The right to procreate is not guaranteed, explicitly or implicitly, by the Constitution.
In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept.
Being ‘at the mercy of legislative majorities’ is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.
An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.
The Federalist Society has done more for the health of the law than any organization I have witnessed in my career.
Our country is being radically altered, step by step, by Justices who are not following any law.
The judge’s authority derives entirely from the fact that he is applying the law and not his personal values. That is why the American public accepts the decisions of its courts, accepts even decisions that nullify the laws a majority of the electorate or their representatives voted for.
A nations moral life is, of course, the foundation of its culture.
The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses.
A person whose main difficulty is not crop failure but video breakdown has less need of the consolations and promises of religion.
Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups.
If only we could recover mere instruction in an era when SAT scores decline and the solution is not improved instruction but raising all scores so that students seem more accomplished than they actually are.
Burke, unlike the Mill of On Liberty, had a true understanding of the nature of men, and balanced liberty with restraint and order, which are, in truth, essential to the preservation of liberty.
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society carried forward what Roosevelt and Truman had begun and accomplished the most thorough-going redistribution of wealth and status in the name of equality that this country had ever experienced.
President Clinton at one point proposed raising taxes on the rich although it did not appear that it would increase the tax revenues received from them. A substantial proportion of the public said they favored higher taxes on high-income earners even if that did not increase the total taxes such people paid. The effect would not be to help anyone else but merely to pull down the better off.
The Declaration’s pronouncement of equality was sweeping but sufficiently ambiguous so that even slave holders, of whom Jefferson was one, subscribed to it. That ambiguity was dangerous because it invited the continual expansion of the concept and its requirements. The Declaration was not, clearly, a document that was understood at the time to promise equality of condition, not even among white male Americans. The.