American Consequences - October 2021

“How dreary – to be – Somebody Hoe public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!” – Emily Dickinson, lyric no. 260 “An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.” – Dwight Eisenhower’s definition of an intellectual, quoted by Paul Johnson in Eisenhower, A Life “The devil will be having his fingers in what we call our duties as well as our sins.” – George Eliot, Adam Bede “... the lethal temptation to exchange freedom for security: a bargain that invariably ends up with the surrender of both.” – Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to 2003 reprint of George Orwell’s 1984 “We are forming an aristocracy... in this country... which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves – very splendid, though its origin may have been tar.” “A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.” – Herbert Hoover, 1935 speech to the St. Louis Republican Club “Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.” – Caption by Indianapolis News cartoonist Kin Hubbard, early 20th century

“The radicals of the upper class... they are very luxurious, and these progressive ideas are about their biggest luxury. They make them feel moral, and yet they don’t affect their position. – Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady “Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.” – Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia “In economically benevolent conditions... something we call democracy may even emerge to disguise the realities of power.” – John Keegan, A History of Warfare “Let us have done with British- Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans... If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.” – Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, speech, 1888 “Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.” – Lord Macaulay, “Essay on Mitford’s History of Greece” Abracadabra, thus we learn The more you create, the less you earn. The less you earn, the more you’re given. The less you lead, the more you’re driven, The more destroyed, the more they feed, The more you pay, the more they need,

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October 2021

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