“To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.”
“One of my consists themes over the years—one I will return to in this book—has been the importance of acting politically with the awareness that people who agree with you won’t always be in charge. That is, I believe that it is reasonable and wise, in a democratic social order, to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism: an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules, because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order. That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people. … using the existing rules against your opponents, or formulating news ones with the explicit purpose of marginalizing them, without pausing to ask whether such methods are fair, or even whether they might be turned against you someday, when the political winds are blowing in a different direction. Such is the power of sheer animus: it disables our ethical and our practical judgment.”
“To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices. These best people will provide for you models of how to treat those who disagree with them.”
“When people cease to be people because they are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.”
Roman poet Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”
“There’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity. We don’t want to be paralyzed by indecision or indifference, but like the apocryphal Keynes, we want to have the mental flexibility and honesty to adjust our views accordingly when the facts change.”
Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”
working toward the truth