Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.

Albeit nurtured in democracy, And liking best that state republican Where every man is Kinglike and no manIs crowned above his fellows, yet I see,Spite of this modern fret for Liberty, Better the rule of One, whom all obey, Than to let clamorous demagogues betrayOur freedom with the kiss of anarchy.Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reignArts, Culture, Reverence, Honor, all things fade, Save Treason and the dagger of her trade, Or Murder with his silent bloody fee.

To impart a moral responsibility to exercise fairness in leadership builds greater leaders of strong character.

When you confidently defend fiction, think about reality also.

Within this historic and optimistic future in mind, I have made no value judgment of the destiny bestowed on each nation. For all this, however, leadership matters; so do the institutional structures and the system of political governance.

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

A nation with a thousand awakened citizens and a corrupt leader, is much more alive than a nation with an awakened leader and a thousand corrupt citizens.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, the only respite comes in the form of the open seas and what lies beyond the horizon. So ships are boarded and pain is tolerated just a little while longer.

We’re wasting our time trying to deal with Baghdad, It’s better to call for independence today.