Ben Domenech Quotes

I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.

While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

I'm a creature of the eighteenth century at heart: The Enlightenment and the search for happiness suit me.

It is at best insufficient and at worst inaccurate to settle on a definition of the Enlightenment, for the obvious reason that there was not just one.

I guess it feels to me that the political argument that has been lost in my lifetime is taxation. How do you engage in that debate when people don't trust politicians at all? It is almost impossible to start a conversation about taxation.

People still think there's sort of a debate around the Charter that politicos go into. And I get wrapped up in it, too, from time to time.

Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don't say a damn thing about that. You think we're still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in passing, OK. But don't dwell on it.

People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.

And I've been incredibly lucky to have a long career in journalism that has given me a front-row seat to some of the most important moments in modern American political life.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

The Speaker the last time I checked, is probably one institution in American political life less popular than the IRS.

Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.

My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.

It is tough to run for public office and face an opponent, to decide on issues what is the best thing, then face the criticism from colleagues, voters, the press and defend yourself.

Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life.

From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, presidents have rhetorically opened the door to the frontier for us, and each time, we have turned away to fight over destinations, technologies, and timing.

It would be exciting to take part in what we now call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, but with modern dentistry.

I would have been an essayist in the 18th century. Maybe I'd have had one gag in the piece, but essentially I'd be saying something.

Walter Isaacson attracts the best and the brightest to Aspen. It is exhilarating to listen to the likes of David Rubenstein and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen speak about George Washington and Newt Gingrich and the original intent of the Second Amendment.

The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.

Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.

There was never a promise that race relations in America would be entirely resolved during my presidency or anybody's presidency. I mean, this has been a running thread - and - and fault line in American life and American politics since its founding.

[Bush Hating] undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about.

Media scrutiny is a great trademark of the American political arena.