Ross Douthat Quotes

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.

If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation.

Let's face it: without the French there would be no America...in other words, without them, there is no us.

The Revolution in America signaled the beginning of a new political era, that this revolution would necessarily determine an important progress in world civilization and that before long, it would cause great changes in the social order which then existed in Europe.

I am not worried about this country ever going Communist. We have too much sense for that

I consider Paine our greatest political thinker…. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the world were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.

I don't know how you talk about the founding of America, and what became of the United States, without talking about religious doctrine.

Our country was founded on protest. If it was just shut up and honor your country no matter what, we'd still be flying the Union Jack. That's not what our founding fathers did. They didn't like what was going on, and they broke away and formed their own country.

The New Order wants to put our national interest in the driving seat while continuing with our ideology to fight against colonialism and imperialism.

People don't even recognize who the Founding Fathers of the United States were. They were exceptional human beings - when you signed the Declaration of Independence, that was a death warrant they signed their name to. You have to have courage to put your name on a death warrant against the most powerful nation in the world at that time. And yet, we didn't honor who they really were. They were deists. They lived an enlightened belief system.

The century that just ended was the bloodiest ever recorded. Enormous sacrifices were required of our youth to preserve our free way of life. But because they were willing to make those sacrifices, our survival as a nation and as a free people is no longer threatened. Democracy and private enterprise, though not without their faults, have prevailed over the collectivist ideologies that threatened us with destruction.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism

America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

We have lived six centuries in six years. Let not this costly experience be lost on you. It is time to profit by the crimes of the monarchy, the errors of the Constituent Assembly, the vacillations and eccentricities of the Legislative Assembly, the misdeeds of the decemviral tyranny, the calamities of anarchy, and the misfortunes of civil war.

The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.

The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.

The taverns were the headquarters of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution was a conservative revolution.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine.

Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. The change in the ways of thinking, lately produced by the historic doctrine which we are here examining and commenting upon, takes place at first slowly and afterwards with an increasing rapidity, precisely in that period of human development, in which were realized the great politico-economic revolutions, that is to say, in that epoch which, considered in its political forms, is called liberal, but which, considered in its basis, by reason of the domination of capital over the proletarian mass, is the epoch of anarchical production.

America was not discovered. America was built.

If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

Let us not allow the splits and splintering to frighten us. It is, indeed, a pity, but what can we do, since we are Bulgarians and all suffer from one common disease. If this disease had not been present in our ancestors, from whom we inherited it, they would have never fallen under the scepter of the Turkish Sultan ...

The people of the United States live in a new country, that is, I mean new to western civilization. They came here to get rid of Europe, many of them; some to worship God in their own way and carry on their governments in their own way. They were freed from the long warhabit of Europe.