Lee H. Hamilton Quotes

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

In order to keep anything cultural, logical, or ideological, you have to reinvent the reality of it.

Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times.

There are constant cycles in history. There is loss, but it is always followed by regeneration. The tales of our elders who remember such cycles are very important to us now.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Life creates new heroes, and new heroes always find it easiest to beat up on the previous heroes.

America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America. Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment.

A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.

The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

One thing is certain. The old Piper Laurie is no more.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?

The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

In my end is my beginning.

Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.

Every generation needs a new revolution.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.

The Past, The Present, For the Future

Reform that you may preserve.

No nation is formed within a night, one generation's era of even two. A nation can be described as the continuous string of many generations that time, this pitiless, thoughtless sword of nature, separates their physical connections along the course of their history.

Institutions may crumble and governments fall, but it is only that they may renew a better youth, and mount upwards like the eagle.

An end of something means the beginning of something else, and I don't think that something else is going to be the death of the manned space program.