A Free People's Suicide Quotes

“Americans might ponder two quotations. One is the much-cited, self-congratulatory saying attributed to Tocqueville (but whose source no one has so far been able to show me): "America is great because America is good." The other is the very real saying of Samuel Johnson, attacking the similar self-congratulatory "greatness" of the English: "We continue every day to show by new proofs, that no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“In short, contrary to the founders—and in ways they do not realize themselves—Americans today are heedlessly pursuing a vision of freedom that is short-lived and suicidal. Once again, freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster.”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“In 1916, President Wilson drafted the speech in which he declared, "It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be." His Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in the margin: "Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama."6 That”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“Money rather than monarchy and plutocracy rather than theocracy are the chief threats to republicanism today.”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“The Spirit of
Liberty" is not to be found in courts, laws and constitutions alone. "Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to save it. While it lives there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it."" The”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“The framers also held that, though the Constitution's barriers against the abuse of power are indispensable, they were only "parchment barriers" and therefore could never be more than part of the answer. And in some ways they were the secondary part at that. The U.S. Constitution was never meant to be the sole bulwark of freedom, let alone a self-perpetuating machine that would go by itself. The American founders were not, in Joseph de Maistre's words, "poor men who imagine that nations can be constituted with ink."" Without strong ethics to support them, the best laws and the strongest institutions would only be ropes of sand.
Jefferson”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, "Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can do without?"4”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“Jean Jacques Rousseau was at least right about this: better to face up to one's chains than to deck them with flowers and pretend they are not chains." ― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“Over these is elevated an immense tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle.... It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting on one's own; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way; it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.41
BEWARE”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“If Sparta and Rome perished," Rousseau wrote, "what state can hope to endure for ever?”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“For all of us, the time is short and the span of life is brief On top of that, our real human problem, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said in a direct rebuke to the modern illusion, is not just that life is short but that we waste so much of it-so that life ceases for us "just when we are getting ready for it."35
But”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future