If You Can Keep It Quotes

“Our exceptionalness is not for us but for others. That is the paradox at the heart of who we are. So what makes us different has nothing to do with jingoism and nationalistic chest beating. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have been good. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have longed to help make others great too. That earnest humility and generosity must be attended to.  •”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Some problems cannot be cured through legislation. But they must be attended to nonetheless. And here’s the problem: The less the culture attends to these things, the more the government will attend to them and the less freedom there will be.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“It’s our job to “keep” the republic called America, and we can hardly keep what we don’t even know we have. So”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Heroism and ignominy both are part of our history. The only question is whether, having seen both, we can repent of the one and rejoice and be inspired by the other. Or whether we will let one of them tempt us so far away from the other that we have a deeply distorted view.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“The founders understood that for people to govern themselves, two things that had never before existed must be brought into existence simultaneously. The first had never existed in the unadulterated form in which it would exist now; and the second had really never existed at all. Both spoke to an understanding of mankind that was corroborated by observation and history and that was, in the founders’ estimation, a biblical understanding of things. Each of the two things answered a particular question and solved a particular problem: The first understood that man was fallen, and the second understood that he could be redeemed. The”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“As President Truman put it, “Being an American is more than a matter of where you or your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“G. K. Chesterton once said that “America is the only nation that is founded on a creed.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Self-government will not work unless the citizens bear the responsibility to vote in such a way that continues their freedoms and their ability to have free elections, that continues their economic prosperity. They have to vote in a way that does not trade the future for the present. This”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“the founders understood that freedom and religion went hand in hand, that freedom must have religion and religion must have freedom. One without the other was in fact neither. Freedom without religion would devolve into license or end in tyranny; and religion without freedom would really be only another expression of tyranny.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Ronald Reagan had a plaque on his desk that said “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“We therefore must apprehend the idea that if we cease to be strong—and if we cease to be the America we were at first—the whole world will”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“For another, because of the religious disparity among them they had a deep and abiding respect for religious freedom and were well practiced in living with those who held different beliefs from their own.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Adams understood that the secret to self-government is that the people must themselves be self-governing, which is to say they must be motivated by something beyond the law.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Unless we are hopelessly bound by cynicism, we have to acknowledge that the United States has been remarkably and consistently generous in sharing what it has, whether material things or ideas.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“But we are today in very real danger of doing just that, of becoming America in name only.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Years later it occurred to me that I was doing the same thing when I was helping my daughter memorize “Paul Revere’s Ride.” I was teaching her to love sacrifice and goodness and truth and beauty, and I was teaching her the history of America and therefore teaching her to love America,”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“That is what religious liberty was and is. The government essentially said, Yes, be religious. We will not only tolerate it; we will respect it and we will encourage it. But we cannot take sides or put our thumbs on the scales. But the understanding of this has been lost to many in modern America.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Since the Pilgrims came to our shores in 1620, religious freedom and religious tolerance have been the single most important principle of American life. This”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country. Tocqueville also said that there was “no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Adams understood that the secret to self-government is that the people must themselves be self-governing, which is to say they must be motivated by something beyond the law. Each individual must govern himself, and for this morality was plainly necessary.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“Tocqueville put it as bluntly as Franklin or Adams had, writing: “Liberty cannot be established without morality.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“So Franklin, without feeling the need to explain himself much, is bluntly saying that “freedom requires virtue.” And that less virtue inevitably begets less freedom.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“They understood that America would not flourish without great help from all Americans.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“one’s thoughts were regulated by the power of the state, how could one really be free?”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“that country where they wouldn’t be told what to think or how to live or even whether or how to worship.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“what it was that made one virtuous, whether religion or simple cultural habit, or a”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“After his own experience in Oxford, he knew that the Christian faith was not about how one behaved but about what one believed, and if one truly believed one could do nothing to achieve salvation but believe in Jesus, one’s behavior would follow.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“America in the twenty-first century has generally returned to the worldview of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment rationalists, who were so appalled at the religious wars of the previous century that they recoiled from all religion, unable to fathom a world in which religion and freedom could be mutually supporting.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

“They understood that freedom was not merely the freedom to be left alone; it was the freedom to do what was right.”
― Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty