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He thought his face ugly, failed to tame his disobedient hair, and moved with an alarmingly gangly gawkiness, as if about to run into things and knock them over.
Springfield speech: If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?—You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first
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Lincoln concluded mildly, “seem not to rest on a very firm basis even in his own mind.”
“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” Lincoln emphasized. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”
despite his never having seen this sentence—“an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”67
But we do know that Athens, the model for all subsequent democracies, defeated itself in the end because it bore deaths more easily than questions about the purposes of its wars.60
The weak and the vacillating may find “relief and peace and strength” in following such a person, “to whom all issues are clear, whose universe consists entirely of primary colors, mostly black and white, and who marches toward his goal looking neither to right nor to left.” But there are also, within this category, “fearful evildoers, like Hitler.”
Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends, which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought, or introverted feeling, but are the crystallisation, the raising to great intensity and clarity, of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking and feeling in some dim, inarticulate but nevertheless persistent fashion. Which allows such leaders then to convey, to those citizens, “a sense of understanding their inner needs, of responding to their own deepest impulses, above all of being alone capable of
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For he showed “that power and order are not . . . a straitjacket of doctrine, . . . that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty—a loose texture of society—with the indispensable minimum of organising and authority.”
I get a sense whe triumph i achieved then there is a sense of minimizng the content of the struggle over person of the leader
would be the denial of justice, because the price of justice could be the denial of victory.
America and Russia differed, he could now see, not just in geographies, histories, cultures, and capabilities, but also, critically, in necessary ecologies. One thrived on cacophony. The other demanded silence.
“What is happening [in the Soviet Union] is . . . unspeakably sordid and detestable,” Berlin wrote a friend in November 1946: “[T]he slow humiliation of poets and musicians is more awful in a way than outright shooting.”25
But Marxists claimed “to know in advance whether a man’s views are correct . . . simply by finding out his social or economic background or condition.” They assumed “the irrefutability of [their] own theory.”28
This made the two great disruptions of his era—World War II and the Cold War—the results of “totalitarian” determinations to remove contradictions “by means other than thought and argument.”
But what if time flowed too slowly? What if no “truths” existed? What if they did, but were impossible to detect? These were the subversions with which nineteenth-century Russian radicals infected the twentieth century: “[I]f the revolution demanded it,” then “everything—democracy, liberty, the rights of the individual—must be sacrificed to it.”
Lenin had no such qualms: The masses were too stupid and too blind to be allowed to proceed in the direction of their own choosing. . . . [T]hey could only be saved by being ruthlessly ordered by leaders who had acquired a capacity for knowing how to organize the liberated slaves into a rational planned system.
may be entirely inconsistent,” FDR went on to explain, “if it will help win the war.”36 Consistency in grand strategy, then, was less a matter of logic than of scale: what made no sense to subordinates could make perfect sense to him.
“Any complex activity,” Clausewitz writes, “if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament.
Xerxes couldn’t contain his ambitions while Artabanus couldn’t conquer his fears: both yielded, if in different ways, to intemperance.
Positive liberty required no proofs beyond what theory provided, for if ends were compatible, means would automatically converge. Negative liberty expected neither compatibility nor convergence, but valued experience, subjecting theory to its corrections.
United States attorney general, is responding to a student’s question about the Mexican War: “Some from Texas might disagree, but I think we were unjustified. I do not think we can be proud of that episode.” Many in Texas did disagree, to such an extent that Kennedy had to promise his older brother that he would clear all future observations on that state with the then vice president of the United States.46 Some months later, as a first-year graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, I watched a videotaped lecture by the Yale diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, a man of clear
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Brilliant
Proportionality comes from what grand strategy is: the alignment of potentially infinite aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.
This is what Clausewitz meant by subordinating “war” to “policy,” for what freedom could come from total violence? It’s what Augustine sought by seeking to make wars “just.” And it’s what Sun Tzu, with uncharacteristic gentleness, acknowledged: that “while an angered man may again be happy, and a resentful man again be pleased, a state that has perished cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life.”
