Ben

“All ideologies are characterized by abstract and universal claims that are suited to a narrow rationalism but ill-suited to human experience.”
― Ted V. McAllister

“To the extent we look to some distant government to tend to our character and needs, we lose the habits of face-to-face involvement, cooperation, and conflict in which we learn to respect ourselves and other people. We lose the essential, concrete communities in which we become something more than individuals: real persons participating in associations where we belong and have purpose.”
― Ted V. McAllister, Coming Home: Reclaiming America's Conservative Soul

“Despite philosophical fantasizing about self-sufficient individuals, human beings need a deep belonging and the more they are individualized, the more they are eager to assimilate collective identities - even absurd ones - without realizing to what extent their self-proclaimed individual sovereignty is illusory”
― Ryszard Legutko, The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols

“The truth is that no nation can be constantly prepared to undertake a full-scale war at any moment and still hope to maintain any of the other purposes in which people are interested and for which nations are founded.”
― Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans