Back Roads and Better Angels Quotes

“In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes,”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“It was really about the Vietnam War,” George Lucas said years later of the film he wrote and directed, which carries echoes of the descent of the Roman Republic into monarchy, “and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term, which got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships? Because the democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“In 2001, we had a president who said, ‘This is not about Islam — Islam is a religion of peace,’ and research does show that political leadership makes a difference. If political leaders are using hateful rhetoric, then we see a rise in hate crimes.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“The danger to society lies not in artists, sculptors included, who are tainted by hateful ideologies, but in audiences who can’t recognize and condemn the hate without trying to silence them and censor their entire body of work.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“oversuspicious, overaggressive” terms — that the last days are near. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever running short.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“The merger between evangelical Christianity and Republican Party politics, begun in the 1970s, has reached its apogee under Trump, who personifies what historian Richard Hofstadter in 1963 called “the paranoid style in American politics,” capturing the national predilection for thinking — in “overheated,”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“He feels much the same way about government, seeing it as a critical partner, but a junior one. “We believe the government is very valuable and important, but we can’t go and take all the human shit of the world” — he’s talking about problems, not people — “and then shovel it over to city hall and demand that they fix it, which is what we do right now. We’re pointing our finger at the mayor and the council or the governor or the president of the United States. Well, stop. We the people are responsible for this deal.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“immigrants have crime rates that are about half the rates of native-born Americans. If those of us born here had crime rates equal to those who arrive or stay without authorization, the country would be a whole lot safer.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“a chance to strike and go somewhere else, where you may not be degraded…Then you can better your condition, and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round.” Lincoln knew that economic mobility can require geographic mobility and that America’s great promise — democracy, freedom, and equal opportunity for all, including immigrants — is built on faith in the future, not longing for the past. But Wister was right: fiction outlives fact.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“Geographic mobility is at its lowest level since records began being kept in 1947. The varied causes of the slowdown, including rising housing costs, are not easy to change, but little effort is being made in part because politicians generally don’t like to tell voters that it may be in their best interest to move. Lincoln, whose family moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois in pursuit of economic opportunity, had no such qualms. Addressing striking shoe workers in New Haven, Connecticut, he said, “If you find it hard to better your condition on this soil, you may have”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“Money has always been at the heart of the American idea, since the Boston Tea Party and George Washington’s land claims, and it has always been both a powerful force for national unity among a polyglot of ethnicities and religions and a challenge to it. Wister’s lament — that the rise of cultural diversity and corporate power led to a tragic national decline that betrayed our founding identity and ideals — is bunk. But it is enduring in part because we are always mistaking it as a new phenomenon. The problems of capitalism faced by places like Sinclair and Hanna are often tragic, but recognizing that they are not new, and that the most common political response to them — lashing out at immigrants and faceless enemies, whether corporations or countries — is not effective, can help us see that other approaches are required, whether renewable energy, place-based economics, or even a more politically fraught idea: helping people move.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“For fundamentalists, the world was always in a state of crisis, with Satan ever appearing in new guises.” As existential threats to the country, Catholics gave way to Muslims, alcohol to abortion, Germans to Latinos, and — increasingly — communists to Democrats.”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy

“Lincoln’s longtime barber in Springfield, William de Fleurville, was a Haitian immigrant,”
― Francis S. Barry, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy