Civic Maturity Quotes

We've got to stop the name-calling and we've got to stop looking at the next election. We've got to be focused on figuring out what we're doing for the next generation.

The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in the maturity of their judgement the great postulate of our democracy.

None but a people advanced to a high state of moral and intellectual excellence are capable in a civilized condition of forming and maintaining free governments, and among those who are so far advanced, very few indeed have had the good fortune to form constitutions capable of endurance.

Doing what you thought was right for the country, rather than what was politically expedient, seems almost as quaint now as having civil disagreements with those whose viewpoints differ from your own.

Our society has come to look more like an unsupervised playground than a forum where differences are seriously discussed, alternatives weighed, and compromises forged by give and take. Many of us would be willing to submit to some adult supervision, but we're having considerable difficulty finding anyone in charge who is acting like an adult.

A republican government in a hundred points is weaker than an autocratic government; but in this one point it is the strongest that ever existed — it has educated a race of men that are men.

We are not naughty children, and the state is not our parent.

I say this ironically, not because I favor the State, but because people are not in the state of mind right now where they feel that they can manage themselves. We have to go through an educational process - which does not involve, in my opinion, compromises with the State. But if the State disappeared tomorrow by accident, and the police disappeared and the army disappeared and the government agencies disappeared, the ironical situation is that people would suddenly feel denuded.