Yuval Levin Quotes

#1. Just as solidarity had an underside of repression, so liberalization had an underside of chaos;

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#2. The objects and the flavor of our national nostalgia are not random. They draw on the memories of a particular group of Americans who have exercised an extraordinary power over the nation's self-image.

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#3. There are only perches within society, and we can elevate our sights by considering how things might look from those of others.

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#4. we should consider how they came to be, how and why America has changed, and what this might mean for what America is becoming.

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#5. How can we make the most of the opportunities afforded by the dynamism and the freedom set loose by America's postwar diffusion while mitigating its costs and burdens, especially for the most vulnerable among us? In

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#6. Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones.

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#7. by exposing something I have seen to someone with eyes to see it differently from me, might spark some insights that would not have otherwise occurred to either of us. And

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#8. The government of human beings, he argued, is a matter not of applying cold rules and principles, but of tending to warm sentiments and attachments to produce the strongest and best unified community possible.

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#9. progress of the ethic of diffusion and liberalization has meant growing estrangement from precisely these prerequisites for human flourishing, especially among the least advantaged Americans.

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#10. moral anarchy has actually become something like the explicit goal of some of our most influential institutions.

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#11. In our time, in particular, many people are not only estranged from some of them but are denied the chance to encounter them.

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#12. The experience of seeing differences of dogma made moot in practice by the bonds of family affection and neighborly respect was formative for him. It seemed to leave him with a lasting sense that life was more complicated in practice than in theory - and that this was a good thing.

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#13. first, that whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and in the process alienating the public.

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#14. Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all, Burke writes.

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#15. The pervasiveness and intensity of our nostalgia make it hard to achieve the kind of analytic distance that would allow us to address these questions seriously. That

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#16. The concerns of vulnerable workers and the poor, and their particular susceptibility to the ill effects of the diffusing forces operating in our society and economy, therefore need to be front and center in our economic thinking. This

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#17. Low-income Americans' potential for mobility is often impaired by family breakdown, cultural dysfunction, and the polarization of norms

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#18. Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T

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#19. We are uneasy. And unease leads men and women to seek change, to innovate, to build on the best that they have and to uproot the worst.

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#20. social Left is a minority, too, and it is a minority aspiring to dominate our institutions at a time when those institutions are particularly weak and diffuse.

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#21. it will have to overcome a social vision that is by now deeply rooted and powerfully dominant among liberals: the idea that the only genuine liberty is individual liberty, and that the only legitimate authority is the authority of the national government. The

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#22. In our time, no less than any other, traditionalists should live out their faiths and their ways in the world, confident that their instruction and example will make that world better and that people will be drawn to the spark.

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#23. countless Americans of all parties and no party are practical, experienced experts in putting family, faith, and community first and helping one another in hard times. A

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#24. The poor are more isolated - economically, culturally, and socially - than they used to be in America.

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#25. It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms.

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#26. [T]heories inevitably can't be as complex as life itself.

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#27. We should look for ways to thrive that are suited to the nation we have become and are still becoming.

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#28. The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars - whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.

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#29. Institutions that channel social knowledge from below and address human needs at a personal level are more likely to adapt to problems and circumstances and to find solutions. That

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#30. A culture of more ordered individualism was more valuable to people building from a foundation of stability than to those working to rise from entrenched disadvantage, or to overcome the burdens of broken homes and communities.

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#31. The more hopeful mode suggests that emphasizing the needs and well-being of one's near-at-hand community first and foremost can be, for social conservatives, not an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.

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#32. efforts and character of institutions like these can grow into a way of life when the people involved in them put them at the center of their cultural existence and identity and, as it were, fall into orbit around their rich moral core.

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#33. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.

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#34. Over and over, the effects of America's diffusion, and then of its efforts to adjust to that diffusion, seemed to reach the wealthy and advantaged as rewards, but hit the poor and disadvantaged as punishments.

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#35. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle," Burke writes.

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#36. Our keen sense of our own unease does not mean that we are stuck, therefore. It means that we are already moving. But where, and how?

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